105.-anarkata-my-gender-is-marronage-copy.pdf

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My Gender is Marronage

Nsambu Za Suekama

30 June 2021

Contents

1, Kala (Saturday, 19th June)

2. Tukula (Sunday, 20th June)
3. Luvemba (Monday 2ist June)
4, Musoni (Tuesday 22nd June)
5. Kala (Wednesday 23rd June)
6. Tukula (Thursday 24th June)
7. Luvemba (Friday 25th June)
8, Musoni (Saturday 26th June)
9. Kala (Sunday 27th June)
Epilogue

Suggested Resources

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nation to restore balance in the world through mastery of all,
four elements.

Now, in our ancestral practices, a child would be born, and
the elders would observe certain habits, likes, inclinations, and
responses to their environment. They knew based on sacred
teachings that these traits and behaviors and impulses were
indicators of what divine calling the kid might have had upon
their head. So they provide the ritualized pathways for one to
begin to step into this personal truth, and journey toward their
higher self. Then, the devotee would live out a spiritual walk,
contemplating myths woven around natural phenomena and
human activity, with each ritual and meditation and magical
working as a touchstone for becoming clearer on the destiny
that one either chose or was given by God upon entrance to
this reality.

In the Black church, when folk go off to fast, or to seek (for
the Gullah) or tarry (for the Pentecostal) or mourn (for the Spir~
itual Baptist) and when they interpret dreams or visions or the
Scriptures or everyday life moments, with a focus on trying to
discern (or divine) God's will for one's life in particular, this is
an expression of the African mystical complex. For Black trans
folk in particular, however, I think our ritual is the act of flight.

I remember my first time flying. There wasn't elders to
guide me. I was often on my lonely as a little kid. My mother
always thought I could handle being by myself a little more
than my brother. How I remember it, I was in the living
room one day, by myself, just walking, quietly, reflecting,
soaking in. And the sweetest light was pouring in from the
fire escape window, a golden drip from the sky. And the house
is vibrating with the thronging voices of a choir that played
from the radio. I was caught up that day. I started shuffling in
acircle, going around and around, looking up at the ceiling, as,
the gospel praising was pouring into my skin like the rhythms
our ancestors would stomp into the wood floor of the praise
houses. And I saw a vision in those days: I saw a black expanse,

6

vast yet endearing, deep as the dark shrouds in the sea where
no human has gone but those who jumped over. And scattered
all throughout this canopy of cosmic shadows, there were
versicolor shards, flecks of blue and green and yellow and
purple and pink and orange and red light hanging like angels
around, carrying the chorus into the presence of God. ‘This is
how I conceived of the sacred.

“Oh yonder come day,

Yes heard em say

Yonder come day

Oh [heard em say

Yonder come day

Yeah, I heard them say

Day has broken into my soul
Yonder come day

Iwas on my knees

Yonder come day

Iwas on my knees

Yonder come day

Iwas on my knees

Day has broken into my soul
Yonder come day...”

2, Tukula (Sunday, 20th June)

Taint learn til much later in my life that what I experienced
in the living room that day as a youngin was not just me con-
templating the freedom in the gospel message. I was engaging.
in a form of ancestral remembrance.

See, long ago, when African people were brought here in
chains, they used to sneak away from their captors. Go into
the woods, the shadows, to shuffle in a circle too. They were
tracing the four points of the Sun, from when it rose, to when
it was high in the air, to when it set, and then to when it was at

7

rest on the other side. They let the mysteries of this cycle shine
into their consciousness. They created a worship and praise
experience, and invoked wonders from nature and the afterlife
that allowed them to understand their suffering. These were
traditions brought over from the Motherland.

Many of them sang spiritual songs that helped them store
these meditations in their hearts and minds. They would reflect
on God and the message of Christ from this lens, with a focus
on both liberation and salvation, Others used this as a way to
pray in a more Islamic fashion, placing an altar before them to
circumambulate or go around it while meditating, still with the
same liberating objective.

Or pots would be placed at the center of the ring, to collect,
the sounds of these chants, so that the master couldn't hear
what was going on, but also so that they could capture the
miraculous energies they were shaking up into a vessel, like
a charm. Those who had canes or walking sticks would use
them to beat the ground, while others were stomping or clap-
ping or miming and using hand signs. They would dance and
be quickened by an ancestral power, manifesting the promise
of the world on the other side of the water ~ Africa, but also,
more symbolically, the realm of the dead, and those who were
considered closer to the Divine, those who were at the origin
of humanity,

‘They had dreams and visions of resistance because of
this Afrocentric religious complex. It was known at times
as a “Hush Harbor” Some of them, like Harriet Tubman
and Nat Turner, allowed these unctions to guide them while
they resisted slavery, planning rebellions and acts of escape
through it, And many of our modern Black artistic creations ~
including non-religious creations like the blues, jazz, hip hop,
ete... all of it was made because of these secret ritual spaces.

Those who were most committed to this mysticism were
called “the people who could fly” They were respected, revered,
held in high regard. They were demonized, though, and to this,

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day, white Man religion calls African faiths, music, culture,
healing practices demonic. This is because it is all associated
with those who were most likely to rebel: the runaway slaves,
the ones who “hit flight” and got off the plantation, who could
no longer be held as property and have their labor forced out
of them,

One of the most well known “people could fly” stories is
traced back to the Georgia coast, which was where a huge num-
ber of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States were
dropped off. In this particular event, it was a crew of Igbo cap-
tives from Nigeria, who decided they would rather drown than
be slaves. The enslaved Igbos fought the masters and then dove
into the sea, hoping to return to the ancestors, and therefore,
back to Africa, The legend has it that as their bodies sank be-
neath the surface of the ocean, they were tumed into Buzzards
and flew away.

My first time hearing about these “people can fly” stories
‘was from a little children’s book we had lying around when I
‘was small, There were these beautiful illustrations inside, of
Black folk rising into the sky off plantations. There was an
elder; his name was Tobi, which is short for a word meaning
“God is great” in the Yoruba language of West Africa. He would
go to the other enslaved people and whisper a proverb in their
ears from the Luba people of Central Africa: “kum bumba yali,
kum bumba tambe. Kum kunka yali, kum kunka tambe” It
meant, “if the master gon fool us, we gon fool the master. If
they gon play our heads, we gon play theirs too.” This idea of
trickery was always a reference to African spiritual practices:
Hoodoo, rootwork, and conjure. I would later learn from
‘one of my trans sibs that back in Africa, there were spiritual
leaders called chibados who were what today would be called
transgender. My sib let me know that the chibados came from
Central Africa, which happens to be where a lot of the beliefs
and practices in Hoodoo come from. And then my sib let me
know this: basically trans and other gender variant Black folk

9

who were reconnecting to our ancestors, we were like the
inheritors of a legacy from these ancient African priests. In
other words, as Black trans and queer folk, we are the people
who can fly.

“Sister, sister, you come down.
Down to the mire

Come on down, down to the mire.
Lower, lower, in the mire.

Low, chile, in the mire

Down, chile, to the mire

When you bow, in the mire.

‘Then you rise, from the mire.
Higher, higher, in the mire.

You shout around, in the mire”

3. Luvemba (Monday 21st June)

That day in my living room as a kid, shuffling in praise,
stands out in my memory because it remains a classic exam-
ple of how I once lived my life. There was a sense of elevation
or uplift at work inside me all the time. I was always waiting
on the Divine, and mounting up as if on eagle's wings. And
the furthest thing from my mind was the idea that my body
had any limitations attached to me just based off how I looked,
how I was shaped. I was fluid and free and fabulous and fierce,
and I didn’t live with much fear at all.

‘The shuffle dance is known as a Shout, by the way. It's
not about yelling. The name is based off an Arabic word be-
cause some Africans were Muslim when they got brought here
in chains, The tradition comes from indigenous African reli
gions, though, old old old practices, deep in Bantu-Congo cul-
tures at the heart of the Motherland. In these lifeways, the peo-
ple would gather together under the guidance of ritual leaders

10

known as ngangas, and through movement they would med-
itate to get in touch with their higher self. Sometimes they
‘would consume herbs to help induce this state of contempla-
tion or trance, and it would allow them to receive messages
from the ancestors in their journey of self-discovery.

A large percentage of the Africans brought to the Ameri-
cas as enslaved people come from Congo/Angola heritage. This
is why a lot of Black folk here, while they are Christian, will
dance in church and still call ita “Shout.” And during these cer-
emonies, they will encourage each other to “think about” (or
meditate) on “what God is doing” for them, And it’s usually
presented as a mystical quest for personal fulfillment, an “of-
fering of praise” in order for “the blessings to come down’ in
terms of their hopes and dreams for healing or financial secu-
rity or more.

‘The Congo/Angola region was once the center of a pow-
erful network of kingdoms in ancient Africa, But in the 1600s,
right around when the Europeans from Portugal came through
with Christianity and slavery, the region was divided within it-
self and at war. In the midst of the turmoil, there was a nganga
who warned that if the people converted to white Man reli-
gion they would be enslaved. Her name was Kimpa Vita. She
was one of the first people to teach that Jesus was Black, and to
redefine the Bible in light of Black history. She called for unity
in her kingdom, and so the idea that Black people deserved to
assert a collective self-determination over our societal history,
on our terms, was pioneered by Kimpa Vita. You wouldn’t have
modern Black nationalism if not for her.

‘The church didn’t like her doctrines. They didn't like her
campaign against European authority. They claimed that she
‘was possessed by the devil. What is interesting to me is that
part of why they demonized her is because she claimed to be
possessed by a male Saint. This Saint was the patron of lost
things. Kimpa Vita had fallen sick and underwent rituals, and
in that process she received visions from this Saint, and suppos-

uw

edly she died and came back to life with his spirit and power
having filled her up. This was what inspired her to try to regain
the lost sovereignty of the kingdom and attack the church. And
she asked her followers to venerate the Saint who inhabited
her body, so that they could fight with her to regain the lost
kingdom.

learned about Kimpa Vita from an old trans homie. They
taught me that Kimpa Vita wasn't the first or last person from
Africa that claimed to be possessed by a spirit from another
gender. In fact, my sib told me other stories of Africans who
didn’t exactly fit the standards of today about manhood,
womanhood, and sexuality. I began to learn that there was a
long history of gender/sexwal variance in Africa, and it was
often connected to either spiritual traditions or histories of
resistance or both, Oftentimes, gender/sexual diversity was
seen in the myths and rituals related to deities. For example,
the rainbow was seen associated with a gender variant orisa
known as Osumare. The wind was associated with Iansa,
who was a woman but also seen as masculine, Whenever
people would venerate these and other deities, sometimes they
would come and inhabit the people momentarily, regardless
of gender. And the ritual leaders would actually dress the
possessed devotees up as these divinities, regardless of gender!
Men with womanly spirits; women with manly spirits; and
folks who didn’t fit either category being inhabited by spirits
that were also not held to those categories.

‘The church, unsurprisingly, called all of these entities “de-
monic” And attacked African faiths because of it. I remem-
ber learning about how when they would translate the Bible
into local African languages, they would intentionally use the
names of important deities as an equivalent of “Satan. in order
to delegitimize them. For example, Exu, who is a trickster. In
many African traditions, tricksters were understood as a gate-
way between humanity and the Divine, They were basically
like Jacob's Ladder. They opened up the pathways for human

2

consciousness to access spiritual knowledge, and for spiritual
power to enter human consciousness, Interestingly, they were
connected to gender/sexual fluidity, seen as what today would
be called androgynous, intersex, or even transgender, queer,
bisexual, ete, Exu for example is said to be gender variant. Of
course, when translating the Bible into Yoruba, “Exu” was used
for “Satan” Now the trickster becomes evil, rather than a holy
messenger like before.

‘The situation facing us as Black trans queers today is con-
nected to all of this. The general society sees us as tricksters,
as people who tryna fool them and play them. But they don’t
respect the higher truths we help usher into this reality. They
don’t want to hear us when we reveal what Africans used to
know well: that biological sex is an illusion and that both hu-
manity and deity exist along a spectrum. And they especially
don’t like to see that so many of us are involved in Black re-
bellion. Like Romaine-La-Prophetess, another gender variant
priest. He claimed to be possessed by a female Saint, and was
a central figure in the history of the Haitian Revolution, which,
‘was the world’s first successful slave revolt, and which kicked
off the First Great Upheaval against chattel slavery worldwide,
striking fear into the hearts of the Man to this day.

So we have Black gender/sexually variant people involved
inanti-colonial and anti-slavery movements. Black queer/trans
folk have also been involved in the socialist and anarchist and
feminist movements as well. First we challenge white Man re-
ligion, then we challenge white Man science and its medical
institutions; now many of us are challenging the government,
challenging the capitalist system, challenging hierarchical kin-
ship structures like our families, and other forms of domination.
This, quite unsurprisingly, makes us a threat in this society.
‘And that is why we get treated the way we do. It is not merely
hatred of our identities but rather an insistence on the world
order that has forced a good number us to fight back both for
ourselves and Black people as a whole.

1B

“What did the giant said?
‘Oh David!

Send me an upright man,
‘Oh David!

A man not afraid to die,
‘Oh David!

Arman that's fit for war,
‘Oh David!

I think I'll go back home
‘Oh David!

‘Think I'll go back home
‘Oh David!”

4, Musoni (Tuesday 22nd June)

I remember being tiny and coasting through my life like a
lil “futterby? The looseness in my hips, the relaxedness in my
wrists, a prance here, a skip there, gliding with an angel's sway.
Thad no labels to describe myself then; I was just me, with no
reason to hate myself. And as for God? I felt God whispering
liberty in my heart.

God was so close inside me that whenever I saw other peo-
ple praying or acknowledging God, I used to gasp and chuckle
out of surprise at the fact that someone else had a relationship
to God too. It was like realizing other people were in on the
best secret the universe could offer. Sometimes people would
see me in these moments and think I was laughing or making
a mockery of religion, but really it was me responding with a
sense of awe. There was not an irreverent bone in my body. I
used to be the one kid who never fell asleep in church, who sat
at the edge of my seat while the preacher talked, and who took
in every minute detail of doctrine and Scripture that I could. 1
remember when kids would come to me to get a better under-
standing of the Bible. And my mom says that I “accepted Jesus

4

Christ as Lord and Savior” as a toddler. This was all while see-
ing myself in the girl characters on television. Not one part of
me was convinced that God hated me for being who I was at
that time.

It was the bigotry that made me hate and doubt myself,
not God. When the yelling started. And the criticism. And the
name calling. And the scrutiny. That really fucked my shit up.
I quickly realized that my every act made me suspicious in the
eyes of men. The world was a dangerous place at that point,
where if I was not extremely cautious and vigilant, someone
‘would come for my whole life. And often times, they did it any-
‘way, no matter what I did. If put on music, my brothers would
say “you like girl songs.” I was into Miss Lauryn Hill, for exam-
ple, real bad, Cuz my mother played her a lot when I was just
born. One time, I was wearing a GAP shirt and then my broth-
ets came out of nowhere talkin bout some “that stands for Gay
American People! Gay American People! Gay American People”
Taunting me. Laughing. There was always so much laughter.

‘There was a kid in school who would always come up in
my face and flick his neck around and his wrist in “effemi-
nate” ways, in order to tease me. Everywhere I went, he was
there like an overseer, to keep me in line. On top of that, there
was the outright harassment. The threat of physical violence
and the actual experience thereof. I remember my first time
being followed into the bathroom. Elementary school. Some
boys were trying to chase me down and beat me up, and one
of them climbed on top of the stall, saying “Don’t worry, I'm
here to watch you" while I was in it. He made it seem like he
was doing it to protect me. It creeped me out and I can’t stand
public bathrooms to this day. There was another time a group
of boys followed me into the changing room, just to see what I
had between my legs, and then went off laughing and bullying
me afterwards. Finally, there was me being touched in ways I
neither comprehended nor agreed to... The first time that hap-
pened, I was told “this is what boys do” while my body was

15

used for someone else's pleasure and I had to sit there con-
fused.

I think the most memorable time some annoying ass gen-
der shit hit me hard as a kid was from my stepfather. It was
carly in the morning. I can't remember what was happening, I
just know he was helping me get dressed and cleaned up. I was
pretty close to him in those days. I remember him rocking me
to sleep and stuff. This particular day, I think he was trying to
put a shirt on me when he got odee mad and just yelled “You
have girl shoulders!” I remember it being said with such dis-
approval. My own family. My father. Those words still haunt
me to this day. They landed with such rancor, like shears that
dug right into my back. I think I stopped trusting him, feeling
comfortable with him right around that time, He started justi-
fying the things my brothers would say and do to me then too.
Like they would bully me and then I would run crying to my
father, asking him to make them stop and he would just tell
me that they were doing it because I “bobbled” my head “like
a girl” or because I “pronounced” vowels “like a girl” Shit was
disappointing. And heartbreaking.

talk about flying as a symbol for what it meant to align my
inner head, to embrace my truth, to walk in my calling, to stand
in my higher self as a young Afro-transfeminine person. I had

that power asa tiny tiny kid. And then people came along, and
they saw me riding high, and they snatched me out the air just
like the slavemasters had done to our ancestors back in Africa
And they ripped my wings out my back. Now, my shoulders
feel heavy, my body feels weighted down to the ground, and
1 feel ugly, and every day I question who I am, and whether T
deserve to be here or if deserve helifire, deserve death, deserve
destitution. And this shit is so hard that my mind literally starts
to feel like it is split into pieces. And I try to close my eyes, and
breathe in through my nose, and I count to nine, and Imeditate
on what it means to ascend again, and [let the air fill my belly,
and Itry to imagine myself rising in the wind, and then Texhale,

16

and count to nine, and I try to relax into the wind, and let it
lift me up, breathing out through my mouth, trying to relax,
and feel free, not like a beast of burden.

I think of flying in the wind, because Marcus Garvey once
spoke of a wind, It represented African liberation, and the an-
cestors. The Black Panther Party used to speak of the wind too,
to represent liberation and reverence for the dead. Malcolm X
says he heard his family talking about the revolution using the
symbol of a wind. In African spirituality, Iansa, the orisa of
winds, who is regarded asa masculine woman, gender variant,
her other name is Oya, “the tearer,’ and they say she represents
change, revolution as well. With these things in mind, I try to
remind myself that I don't have to bend my knee and submit to
anybody's authority, because I fly up in the whirlwind: which
means that I get to define myself, and I get to determine my
destiny, and I get to free myself, and to govern myself, and to
defend myself, and to understand myself on my own terms and
by any means necessary. It is sad that right in our own homes,
in our families, in places that are supposed to be sites of safety
and assurance and nurturance, our own people cannot see that
for us. A family should be supportive, not destructive.

“Oh, hold the baby,
Hold em

Hold the baby,

Hold em

Hold the baby,

Hold em, Lawd rock that have
‘Oh what's the matter?

Hold em

‘What's the matter?

Hold em

‘What's the matter?

Hold em Lawd rock that babe”

7

5. Kala (Wednesday 23rd June)

So, Ibreathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
‘ly; you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down” I start
to think about how Toni Morrison said that the “people could
fly” stories were a “psychological trick” that enslaved folk used
whenever they were asked about their spirituality. Itwas a sym-
bol for the runaways. Stories are such powerful things. They
might be false as hell, but people will hold onto them because
they reinforce an understanding that serves whatever agenda
they want to get done. To say that some of us could fly was to
uphold the agenda for Black freedom.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. I let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
‘fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

I start to recall an old dream Ihad, long long ago, when I was
super super small, [ don’t really understand or remember the
dream too well, but I know how it felt. I felt a thick, warm air
surrounding me, that seemed to lift me up, and it was so cozy
there, and dark like sunset, and I could hear something like
water in the distance, and something like laughter somewhere.
Whoever was there with me, we had gone off somewhere se-
cret, and we were doing something serious, something impor-
tant, something that was gonna change the world. And I felt so
free. So connected. So loved. So held. I didn’t have any of that
in the waking world, though. I was alone and cold and afraid
of the arrows flying at me throughout the day, and it was like

18

the world could not be changed. It was hostile. There was no
escape.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. Ibreathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

‘That song from Solange begins to play now. Where she talks
about tryna drink it away, dance it away, change it with her
hair, work it away, sex it away, sleep it away, read it away,
cry it away. I remember trying to do these things too. And I
remember trying to pray it away. I remember thinking that if
1 Bible-thumped properly, or if I befriended the right people,
or if [berated and bullied those who were like me, that would
help me deal, [also thought it would clear my head, but it ac-
tually knocked me further out of alignment. Who I truly was
became invisible and unrecognizable to me as I locked myself
in the prayer Closet.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
et my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
‘fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

African traditions say that when you not listening to your
inner head, things start to fall out of balance for you. Ask any-
one who knows me well, and they will tell you over time, I re-
ally started falling apart. I was all over the place, anxious and
restless, and then I developed anger issues, and I could not un-
derstand why. I would think that I was being attacked by spir-
its, and then if not, Ijust thought it was because something was
‘wrong with me. That my life was gonna end. That I deserved to
die. And I actually started to look forward to the day I would
meet my demise. I was tired. And ready to go. And sometimes

19

intentionally put myself in harm's way, hoping that I would
go out with a bang.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. I let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

Iremember when it hit a point where people started telling
me I seriously needed help. They kept encouraging me to start
trying to take care of myself, to love myself more, to honor
myself. But I did not listen to them. I could not even under-
stand what that meant, It made no sense to me, But my inner
head knew. A mentor of mine at the time would tell me about
Black queer/trans history, about where terms like “shade” and
“reading” came from; and some of the kids around me taught
me about vogueing and ballroom history, about Willie Ninja,
and the Xtravaganzas, and Crystal LaBeija who pioneered the
first house. And something bloomed inside me: such utter joy
and excitement. It exploded, and I adopted everything I heard
and internalized everything I saw, even while I was still telling
people that I was “straight” Not too long after, I made out with
a guy for the first time, an old friend. And then a few months
later, I was out with some old homies on a boat. And we were
having fun, and some of the girls started picking flowers and
putting it in their hair, and for some reason I felt inclined to put
some pink petals right into my high top fade, with no thought.
And we snapped a photo together, three girls: one of them
trans, me, Although I did not have that terminology to describe
myself at that time.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. I et the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And

20

then I exhale, Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
‘fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

‘The ridicule that came about soon as those flowers wound
themselves into my nappy head surprised me. People who had
insisted that I needed to find love for myself, were suddenly
upset. My parents kept bothering me about it, folks around me
were all curious and questioning me. There were stares and
comments; but, for some reason, my response was different. I
felt like nobody could touch me. had disappeared, into a whirl
wind or storm, into a secret and shadowy place, into the world
of my dreams and visions. And because of that, I remember
when folks started asking if I thought I was a “boy or a girl” be-
cause “only girls can wear flowers” and I just shook my head
and I said “Im just lost in the wild” None of them understood
what I meant, But I knew. I was reclaiming the tradition of the
maroons and runaways. I was learning to fly.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

I think my parents thought the flowers thing was a momen-
tary thing at first, but as I kept it up, the angrier they got. I
‘was buying new flowers, wearing different kinds. My head be-
came a garden, an arboretum, or a hush harbor of its own. I
disappeared into that ancestral communion. ‘This is what I ex-
plained to my stepfather when he insisted on asking me about
it. Lwould show him pictures of people in Africa who wore flo-
ral headdresses and decorated themselves with things from na-
ture, I reminded him that whenever our ancestors escaped the
plantation, they would establish Maroon communities, where
they would reclaim their African culture and spirituality, fight
back against the master, and build new societies in the swamps,
‘woods, forests, jungles, and the mountains. He kept asking me

21

what that had to do with gender and I could not even fully an-
swer the question myself at the time because I did not have the
words for it, All I knew was that it was connected, somehow.

Neither my mother nor my father was hearing what I was
saying. They tried to snatch me out the air like when I was
younger, but it did not work this time. The more flowers I found,
the more my wings grew in, and the bigger they got, the more
they stretched out and shone, and now petals and feathers were
falling around wherever I went. My shoulders felt light again,
dainty; I began to feel fluid and flowy inside, once again, like I
had when I was really small. Each new crown of flowers was
like ceremonial attire, and then I started wearing feminine jew-
elry and more feminine clothes, and eventually dresses, and it
all felt like I was channeling a divine energy. I was transform-
ing and I felt like cosmic effluvia, I was a star, a vibe, a baddie.

T breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
et my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where hold the weight. inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

‘The word “domestic
also means to colonize. It is connected to the word “domestic”
which refers to the home, and both of them are related to the
word “dominion” or “dominate” which means to rule or control.
I mention these things because as I was beginning to transition
into a little wild thing, my parents was not having that up un-
der their roof, and they did everything to preach against and
suppress me because of that. My mother told me that I was ly-
ing on God and tried to lay hands on me and called me heathen,
said Iwas giving glory to the creation rather than the creator.
She even told me that me and her were “on opposing sides” My
father was always trying to flex his age and authority over me,
and would threaten me physically if I challenged it, and even
tell me that “the Bible says that you should honor your mother

te” means to tame a wild animal. It

22.

tral forces for continuity here, and in my opinion was the birth-
place of a Pan-African politico-religious movement. African
spirituality gave them a social bond, social commitment.

It took me a while to even learn the little bit I know about
these things, and even longer to embrace them without being
afraid that it was evil stuff. While I grew up seeing people
“Shout” in church, nobody dared say it was an African thing.
Everyone either attributed it to just God moving through some-
‘one, or someone's emotions moving them toward God. They
never spoke of ancestors or the Motherland. But African spiri-
tual traditions was always at the root everything we did in the
church, whether we knew it or not. Mine was a Pentecostal
denomination founded way in the early 1900s. They believed
that speaking in tongues was a sign that God's spirit was in-
side of you. So, any time a praise break happened, someone
‘was speaking in tongues as their own personal prayer language
from God. The founder of the church had an anti-racist stance.
He didn’t like the fact that during that time, a lot of Christians
were segregationists. They believed that Black people should
live in separate conditions. It was ironic to him. Because in the
Bible, on the day of Pentecost, which is where the Pentecostal
denomination gets their name, the Spirit of God is recorded to
have fallen on people from all backgrounds and enabled them
to speak in all languages, not just one. My church founder be-
lieved that segregation was therefore against the Word.

And this was true for a lot of Black Pentecostals from
his generation. Black Pentecostal churches were some of the
earliest to integrate, especially at the Azusa Revival. The Azusa
Revival is what made Pentecostalism get global attention. For
whatever reason, all the news reporters were interested in this
racially-integrated, tongue-speaking religious experience. It
‘was to the point that many white Christians thought Pente-
costalism as a whole was actually sinful, because they were
so racist that they didn't wanna believe that God had given
his Spirit to people who were in communion with folks from

45

other races. What's more, one of the main critiques made of
the Azusa revival was that it was “voodoo? because the Black
folk who led the revival were singing spirituals and engaging
in practices that were derived from the Hush harbor. To this,
day, Pentecostalism itself is demonized by most Christian
denominations. The rituals and politics of Black Pentecostals,
was always seen as satanic.

When I first began to piece together the context and origin
of these rituals and political histories, I was in college, a time I
do not like remembering. That time was my earliest experience
being faced with outright white racial aggression, something
that was so alienating that I did not know what to do with my-
self. The only thing that made sense was getting into student ac-
tivism on my campus, to address the ways my peers and I were
being called slurs and being told that Black folk deserve police
brutality. I was so angry and upset, and my peers and I were
pushing a social media campaign in solidarity with the Move-
‘ment for Black Lives, and student activism across the country.
While Iwas posting about my experiences, my family members
and people from the church I grew up in started telling me that
what I was doing was not okay in the eyes of God. That [needed
to stop focusing on “the things of this world” and that activism
would distract me from my walk with Christ.

began feeling isolated from my religion. It was difficult to
reconcile my Christian beliefs with a social commitment when
everyone kept telling me this was at odds with the faith. And
then the ring shout came back into my life. I was on youtube,
and I saw a video of these women, dressed in white, shuffling in
acircle, clapping their hands, in a grassy backyard. There were
drums and piano. And they were singing this song “you've got
arright to the tree of life? Seeing these women awoke something
in me: I felt connected to them, and those words, that spiritual
song, and it reminded me that I had a right to resist, that my
church at home was wrong.

46

I started to parse the African spirituality and resistance at
the heart of the Black church history. I began to connect the
Shouts I grew up watching to this ring ceremony, to the Hush
harbor. I found a theological vocabulary to challenge what my
family’s church was saying, I started to dig into Black church
archives, and I even found that the founder of my family's
church used to have community programs, because of his anti-
racist stance. I tried to bring this information to my church,
connecting it to ring shout and hush harbor and slave rebel-
lion and the African rituals that prioritized individual auton-
omy and collective uplift.

My family and church would not hear me. They felt like
me telling them the Shout was African “took the glory away
from God.” And they felt like Black church involvement in ac-
tivism needed to be avoided because of the one thing Martin
Luther King learned: that if you get involved in a racial justice
struggle, you eventually have to confront capitalism which is
its economic basis. My church did not want to do that, because
in confronting capitalism and racism then you realize you have
to confront the institution of the nuclear family, cisheteropatri-
archy, and my family’s church was too transphobic and homo-
phobic and sexist to allow for that. The founder of our church
was so emphatic about cisheteropatriarchy that he broke away
from other Pentecostal denominations that allowed for women
preachers, because he saw that as ungodly.

At this point I knew I was at a crossroads. I could either
hold onto a faith that was so exclusionary in this way, or re-
turn to the source and struggle my way to freedom, But I was
afraid. It was like a stumbling block had been thrown before
me. I didn’t know what to do. That video had an impact on
me. Ring shout had woke up something in me, something that
felt ancient and expansive and powerful and more grounded
than anything else. I could not put it into words, but it was
not just frightening: it was illuminating. The narratives that
associated Africanness and rebellion with the devil were still

47

working through my nerves, though, still working through my
brain, still distracting me and making me believe white Man
lies, I found myself caught between a rock and a hard place, on
one hand trying to maintain favor with my family and church,
but on the other knowing that there was something bigger out,
there.

It took a while to feel brave enough to step out on new faith,
and the way I was able to begin unpacking the beliefs forced
onto me was by choosing to be brave enough to mimic those
women, See, my inner head saw myselfin them. Andas Iplayed
the video, I would shuffle my feet on the floor, in a circle, coun-
terclockwise, and close my eyes, and I started to think about
my enslaved ancestors, and thinking of them reminding them-
selves that they had a right to the tree of life helped me remind
myself of the same. And this is when an old buried memory,
something I had forgotten came back, and an old vision came
back to me, and I realized that when I was small, I used to do
this shuffle thing, this meditation thing, and I used to know
who I was when I was a kid before I got knocked out of align-
ment. And when that clicked, I started to change. It was still
a slow process. It took years. I had to do the ring shout again
and again; I tumed it into a regular thing. Whenever I had time
alone, [would do it. Sometimes I would schedule when: once at,
dawn, again at sunhigh, then evening, and finally at midnight
before bed,

During this time, I started to lear about the modern
prison abolition movement, and I started to learn about Black
nationalism, and the Black Panther Party, the civil rights
movement, the Black Liberation Army. I started to learn about
Assata Shakur, a modern maroon, who escaped being chained
in the US penal system after she was wrongfully framed for
the death of a cop, and is now alive in exile, overseas. The US
government classifies her a terrorist and still wants to recap-
ture her. I started to understand what Marxism was a little
more, how relations to natural resources were transformed by

43,

a mode of production that valued things in terms of unfettered
growth, accumulation, and exploitation rather than direct use
and production for needs of the people. This system warps
how we arrange ourselves and our labor in service of a market,
and is enabled by organized, protected robbery and theft of
resources by the colonizer.

I was becoming braver, less afraid, and so I started to
study revolutionary theory. I began to learn about how race
and gender was a nature-nurture question, not just nature
(genetics). The human species has more variation within so
called racial groupings than across those groupings, because
the traits used to create those categories are actually minute
and inconsequential to our biophysical makeup; furthermore,
regarding sex characteristics, there are about four other known,
combinations beyond the two classified as male/female, such
diversity being about as common as there are redheads, and
many people aren't aware that there is variation even within
so-called sexes. The flattening of both these truths, however,
to fit our differences into a hierarchy and value system, served
a political function on behalf of the Man. And they were
inherently intertwined: the scientists who pioneered modern
biological sciences were the same ones who created racism and
a central facet of how they “proved” Africans were inhuman
was through classifications of anatomical differences marked
as “sex:

I started to learn that what was called “Crime” was really
just a code word for anything that oppressed people did to
fight a system of haves and have nots, or to survive that sys-
tem, and so prisons/police and the courts were tools of oppres-
sion. Some of the main people impacted by this were queer
trans folk just tryna live, because if you're constantly being
segregated against and pushed out of homes, healthcare access,
houses of worship, it’s harder to get or keep jobs, and you're
more likely to turn to certain underground activities to make
it through, including actual resistance. This put them on the

49

front lines of the struggle against modem slavery. These were
new ideas that I had heard about and somewhat considered
growing up, but I never got the opportunity to really study or
examine very deeply until that time period. All the while, I was
beginning to slowly but surely unpack a lot of the things I was
taught to hold onto while I was locking myself in the prayer
Closet. And this meant learning to love the ancestors, to cher-
ish them, to lean on what they have to teach us, and to love
myself,

My first big act of self-love and ancestral remembrance was
saying a big “fuck you” to gender norms. I remember that my
older brother would try to argue with me about this: “the Bible
says God created male and female I was told, which meant
‘man was the head and woman created for him, So anything vi-
olating that was against nature, but more importantly it was a
threat to the species being able to propagate and get its needs in
the environment. How can one be “fruitful and multiply” oth-
erwise right? My brother would emphasize that “there has to
be a distinction.” In his mind, and in the mind of many others,
the only way to manage the affairs of a culture, nation, soci-
ety, is in accordance to what biology supposedly says we can
do. Biology supposedly says that a person's gonad and other
sex characteristics equal such and such thing and so that is the
way they must behave. I was learning that these ideas came
from a “survival of the fittest” narrative, to justify transpho-
bia and homophobia. I started to lean, however, that life was
more than just about biological imperatives: and that the capi-
talist and the colonizer only told us it was because they need to
arrange our people in particular ways in order to divide us and
exploit our labor, keep us suppressed, and continue to profit
from our domination and the destruction of the planet. Rigid
gender norms maintain this process.

In African cultures, I then learned, especially those that
were communalistic, there was a lot more freedom in terms
of gender and sexuality, because the material mode of pro-

50

duction, provisioning, and environmental inhabitation did
not allow for certain forms of oppression. Therefore, when
Europeans encountered African people, they saw whole
persons, who had gifts and talents. We were medicine people,
artisans, divers, farmers, storytellers, warriors, childrearers,
craftspeople, builders, musicians, and more. We were and are
a people who hold the skills that are necessary to build a
healthy society, because we passed those skills down from
generation to generation, and we invent new ones and update
them as time has gone on since the beginning of our existence.
We are the origin of humanity, and we had entire societies and
cultures and often times, the ones holding onto our traditions,
the ones taking leadership as shamans or serving in the royal
court, or pioneering as warriors, were queer and trans. These
were the skills and labor we often passed down, the roles we
occupied, There were multiple ways to arrange ourselves.
Granted, the labels “queer” and “trans” were not used by the
ancestors to describe people like us. There was no need for such
terminology because the marginalization and demonization of
those who today would be called queer or trans is not univer-
sal across the Motherland. Africa was very diverse in ancient
times, and is still very diverse to this very day. But our ances-
tors used gender norms to arrange their societies and divide
labor in a very different way. They knew that a class of beings
could meet its needs in the environment in various ways. When
‘we were given status as priests or in the royal court, it was be-
cause of a recognition of the many roles that can be played to
help our societies survive and evolve. And it wasn't based off
a concern with biology alone, but rather with spirit. Myth and
culture were central in the socio-ecological processes by which
Africans would arrange labor, assign value, and establish a net
work of relations that allowed us to inhabit our environments
in certain ways. Life in those times was far from perfect, but the
systems developed were far less hierarchical and exploitative.

51

Flash forward all these centuries later, and Black trans peo-
ple are saying that our labor and our role in society does not,
have to be limited anymore. This is what I began to understand.
‘We can do more than what the master/bourgeoisie says and we
don’t have to only be what our ancestors did in the past: we
each can define what it means to be the descendants of our an-
cestors for today and the future. We can choose to determine
our genders, and thus establish on our OWN terms what role
in the community we will play, for each individual, According
to our personal autonomy, and the needs of the collective. This
isa communistic and anarchistic vision, aimed at developing a
society maintained by all, from each person's capacity, unhin-
dered by a caste or class or even a party or any demiurge or
patriarch, and that is invested in the life of the planet.

T began to appreciate the value of this revolutionary and
ecogenic perspective on the right to my gender liberation, be-
cause it exposed the question of labor and power and resources
and how they get divided. Without this outlook, it would have
been impossible for me to understand why transphobia and
queerphobia were so hard to exorcise from our people. Even
those who would acknowledge that it was connected to Euro-
pean religion would still uphold its institutions. It’s because
while it could be traced to the myth of the Hamite, the sexu-
ally predatory heathen, the animalistic, savage, crazy, inferior,
Black African, it had more than just a religio-cultural function:
it was developed to serve a society and material interest that
too many of our people, unfortunately want to reap the bene-
fits of.

Europeans, or Black people who want to reclaim colonial
capitalist hierarchies and labor divisions and material power
for themselves, would throw gender/sexually variant Africans
in particular under the bus, to make us a scapegoat that repre-
sented all that was wrong about the “Hamite” Our queerness
and transness was always used as evidence for why Africans
as a whole are supposedly inhuman and deserving of slavery.

52

And they did this intentionally because if they could destroy
us, they could make everyone avoid the cultural touchstones
that were vital to our unity and self-understanding, to further
weaken our nations. So once they get rid of those holding onto
the mythic forces that Africans used to define ourselves, by call-
ing our spiritual leadership satanic, they introduce their narra-
tives, to get people to align their consciousness with whatever
myths the Man wanted to impose, so we could unite with their
material interests over our own. This helps them get over on
our backs.

In this context, some of us began to look down on ourselves,
to see white people's rigid standards as a more “civilized” up-
date to African standards, We ran after the master’s values in
place of ours, hoping to secure some degree of power for our-
selves, We would hide or deny the existence of gender/sexual
variance, or of traditional spirituality in our lives, to help ev-
eryone look more civilized and holy, and rise above our “jun-
gle status” We became obedient and subservient, bending our
knees under their authority, and gave our bodies and labor over
because we were forced. We went into hiding. And the secrecy
turned into forgetting about our own lifeways, and eventually
the forgetting turned into denial, and then the denial turned
into what happens now where folk pattern the white Man's re-
ligion by calling our faiths “demonic” and when that fails they
use the white Man's science by saying that “transness is unnat-
ural!”

When I began to understand these things, I began to real-
ize that to be “trans” (a prefix which literally means “away") is
always about moving “away” from that which was hierarchi-
cally imposed on me at birth. This is why when I first came out
I said that my gender was “marronage,” evoking the runaway
slaves. Iwas tryna define my life in the “wilderness” beyond or
away from the reaches of slavery and its afterlives. Iwas seeing
my transness as a struggle against the racial capitalism that im-
posed cisgender institutions onto my body. Importantly, I was

53

trying to emphasise that I was not just escaping something but
creating something new in the “wilderness” of gender strug-
gle. [earned from Saidiya Hartman that the maroons and run-
aways and outliers were defined as much by what they were
running fromas by what they were running toward (her words,
not mine):

“[S]afe at last, we have come together, here where
no one can reach us anymore, the village of free
people, here we speak of peace, a place of abun-
dance, haven.”

It-was essential for us to update our myths now. Now they
would need to be used to neurochemically reinforce these re-
bellious and proto-revolutionary activities. This is when I redis-
covered the stories about people who could fly. Through these
narratives our ancestors would symbolically uphold the spiri-
tual and ethical validity of maroon acts

It is said the people who could fly had other powers, too:
levitating objects, teleportation, starting fires with their mind,
disappearing into objects. This was, again, a “psychological
trick” (to use Toni Morrison's words): translation, whatever
they needed to do to get free and meet their needs, they did it.
‘They were not bound by what the Man had to say was possible
in this reality because they work its roots, grasp its roots, and
transform that reality in pursuit of life for themselves. So I
began to say to myself that my gender is marronage, getting
lost in the wild, and marronage is both about running away
from something and establishing a new form of African life
simultaneously, and people can fly stories tell me that there
is no limits to how I get this done, if I grasp and work from
the roots of what is oppressing us (ie, T must get free by any
‘means necessary).

Thold onto these insights and beliefs and stories and rituals
now, as a form of remembrance of God and connection to my

54

people and our ancestors and the Black Radical Traditions they
passed down. This is how I immerse myself into a certain con-
sciousness or conscience, a revolutionary commitment. It has
cost me relationships to the people I grew up loving at home
and in church. It has brought me ridicule and other challenges
that I grew up trying to avoid through conformity. But it has
also meant that I was able to discover what it means to be a star
queen. Even though I got spat on and things hurled at me and
attacked and lied on and disrespected, the rewards of learning
how not to bend your knee to the master, how not to transgress
against yourself and how to maintain respect for who you are
and where you came from, and how not to transgress against
your people and to move in solidarity with all of us in our lib-
eration ~ this has outweighed everything else.

“Run, Mary, Run
(Oh, Lord)

Run, Martha, Run
(Oh, Lord)

Tell, Mary, Run
say, you gota right
to the tree of life
Run, Mary, Run

(Oh, Lord)

Run, Martha, Run
(Oh, Lord)

Tell, Mary, Run
say, you got a right
to the tree of life”

9. Kala (Sunday 27th June)
I tried to tell my mother, but she ain’t understand: she had
raised a sojourner in a strange land. Liffe was like quicksand

and I was up to my waist, charging through the fray. I would

55

walk at night under the glare of the lights, wishing for the day
Td lose my life. By this point I was standing in who I was, and
the world was beating back at me, I had to drop out of school
after being attacked.

My back was always on fire and my legs were giving out.
I couldn't sleep, my skin was always itchy. My mind was
racing, throat was sore, body was shaking. Palpitations. There
were knives wearing me down. I got so thin. I felt like pencil
shavings sitting at the bottom of a dustbin. I tried to find love.
Find something that gave me purpose. My partner at the time
showed me a sweetness I will always remember. And I was
working for a bit, and could save, and I was able to pay off
a few things and it was an enjoyable time. But I was unwell.
And the doctors weren't listening to me as I tried to tell them
I was falling apart, And my parents weren't listening to me
as I begged and pleaded with them to let me stay with them,
so I could find rest for my weary bones. And the church kept
offering to pray for me and my healing, but really they were
praying that I'd return to the lies I was taught. And kept subtly
implying that it was my fault why I was now beset with so
many physical, mental, emotional, and financi

In the 1970s, there was a Black revolutionary by the name
of George Jackson who wrote a revolutionary set of letters and
theorized the grounding for a lot of modern prison revolution-
ary organizing. He was assassinated by the prison State, after
having first been jailed on false accusations. To honor him, his
brother Jonathan Jackson, and others who struggled as he did,
incarcerated brethren in the California prisons began to fast, to
train for warfare, to fight, and to study Black radical tradition
during the month of August.

Over the years, the Black August tradition has come to
honor the many deaths and births of Black revolutionary
ancestors and political formations, from across the Diaspora,
which all fortuitously converge in this month, They say the
Underground Railroad was founded on August 2nd, The Fergu-

crises,

56

son Uprising after the death of Mike Brown in 2014 happened
during August. The designation of a red, black, green flag for
all Black people by the Universal Negro Improvement Associ-
ation (an organization founded by Marcus Garvey) happened
on August 13th, 1920. The revolutionary and political prisoner
Mumia Abu Jamal once put it this way:

“August is a month of meaning, of repression and
radical resistance, of injustice and divine justice,
of righteous rebellion, of individual and collective
efforts to free the slaves and break the chains that
bind us”

‘The amount of historical coincidences during August for
the history of Black resistance is so vast I cannot even list all,
the important dates here. I found out about it only in 2018, so
T'm not an expert. I'm still learning, What is always interesting
to me is that the day Ifirst came out as gender variant, that first
time I wore flowers, and I told people “my gender is marronage”
was in August. I remember it. August 14th. That's the same
day as the Bwa Kayiman ceremony. This was the ritual that
launched the Haitian Revolution.

I began to call this day my “fugiversary? or “fugitive an-
niversary’ to highlight that connection between Black rebel-
lion and my journey toward gender self-definition. I began to
look at my “coming out” as a new birth into a sacred or holy
season. I partook in the Black August fast the first that month,
and would try my best to exercise in a way that wasn’t too
much on my disabled body, and to study more, so much more.
Talso would meditate, pray, ring shout at sunrise, sunhigh, sun-
set, midnight. I then learned that that year a prison strike was
gonna happen too, a big one, one of the biggest prison strikes
in the history of the United States. The organizers of the strike
‘wanted to hold it in honor of the Attica Uprising.

I started telling anyone I could about Black August, about
the Prison Strike, and about Black revolutionary struggle in

57

general. It wasn’t like proselytizing though. It was more so
like I was sharing a people's history with others. Like I was
a modern djeli, a griot, the ancient culture bearers and oral
historians of ancient Mali. I was on fire. There was a revolu-
tionary history I could see myself and my transness in now,
more clearly than ever before, and my fugiversary coincided
with some of the most important dates in that history. I was
beginning to take underground methods, dialectics, critical the-
ory more seriously. I remember diving into an analysis of hu-
manism with my comrades at this time. I started to explore my
family’s genealogy records too. Black August fasting was caus-
ing my consciousness to expand in newer directions. This was
when I started to explicitly identify as “gender nonconform-
ing” Before then I hadn't used any of the labels pioneered in
the LGBTQIA+ movement. But now Ihad a confidence and a
frame of reference within which I could locate that terminol-
ogy on my own terms.

‘The contradictions between me and my parents or between
me and my doctors or me and my church began to get heav-
ier. The more radical I became, the less willing to conform to
my assigned gender I became: and my parents weren't having
that, the strictures in the medical industrial complex could not
fathom that, and my church wasn’t tolerating that. Coming out
of Black August of that year, going into the fall, eventually my
battles forced me out the home, and I stopped going to the doc-
tors, and I stopped going to church eventually too.

‘Some comrades came through. One of them I knew through,
my comrade Gil Balagoon (not their real name, but this cat will
know why I call them that). My other comrade, I call him Jimi
Love (also not his real name but he will know why I call him,
that) also held me down,

The love they showed me, that comrade love, it’s a differ-
ent type of love. It’s not like friendship or family or something
sexual and romantic (although it's possible for people to have
comrades who are family, friends, or sexually/romantically in-

58

timate). I can't explain the love in words, but when I think
about it, remember this dream I once had. A dream where a
bunch of us are dancing in the dream, creating something oth-
erworldy but so grounded and needed. And there's this music
playing behind us to set that atmosphere and those intentions.
It’s this set of piano chords, and it’s the kind of sound that feels
at once elegiac and at once blissful, at once melancholy and at
‘once grateful as hell. That's my picture of a comrade’s love: a
dream and a song.

I met my older sister around then too. She also showed up
for me. She started to teach me what it meant to be queer and
on your own, Surviving and hustling, we did that. It was a
rough time. Out where we was at, Ifaced more outright gender
violence than Thad ever before. Rocks thrown at me, people ha-
rassing me even while standing in a crowd in front of the police
with no fear at all, men following me on bikes at night, Twas a
lot more feminine in my appearance then too, and a lot more
comfortable with myself and so that meant people wanted to
fuck with me. My sister tried to teach me how to keep my head
up, to grind, to watch the streets as a gender nonconforming
person, to move tact.

‘The more dangerous the outdoors got for me, the more mil-
itant it made me. This was 2019 now. A lot more trans people,
especially Black ones, were being attacked and killed that year,
I learned. By June, we found out that Layleen Polanco Xtrav-
aganza had been taken from us at Rikers Island, I remember
being ata rally in her honor. I was so angry and fed up by then
with seeing Black trans folks, specifically Black trans women
murdered. I remember going off on the reporters who were at
the rally. Why were journalists showing up after Layleen died?
Where was the media before that? I was in such a rage. Twent
off and I remember some people got shaken up by it and asked
‘me to lead a march so folks could protest and express their frus-
tration, I went for it. Iwas fired up. We did march, Some of the
folks marching had not wanted to march though, particularly

59

a few of the trans gorls who knew Layleen and so they called
‘me out for it. I had tried to get everyone's input on whether a
march was feasible, but the gorls there let me know I needed to
center them because of their safety concerns. Everyone at the
march, for example, kept saying “we have nothing to lose but
our chains.” echoing Assata Shakur, but all the trans women
kept yelling “and our lives! We have nothing to lose but our
chains and our lives” That shook me up. One of my old peers
and comrades was right by my side, We ended up co-founding
a defense formation together. The “street queer anarkata de-
fenders” SQUAD. We chose an acronym like that so it could
blend in with Black lingo. It was focused specifically on the
safety needs of Black trans women and transfeminine people.
That was the vision.

“SQUAD is Street. As in hood, ratchet, ghetto.
There's no respectability over here. We fighting
for freedom by any means necessary, And we
don't need nobody's institutions or authority to
get it.

SQUAD is Queer. As in not cis/het. The straights
and cis gays and their politics stay away! We queer
as in we don’t jack transmisogynoir, we don't jack
colonial values, and we don't jack boujie values,
dont jack cisheteropatriarchy, disablism, human-
centrism—none of it

SQUAD is Anarkata. As in, Black/anarchic/radical
‘This about African-centered anarchy. We fierce,
we maroon, we wayward, we crazy, we savage, we
ungoverned, we undomesticated, we uncivilized,
we wild—all the Things that threaten Man,
SQUAD is a Defense network. This is a fight for
communal and personal safety, by us, for us

60

Defenders are committed revolutionaries fighting
against all domination”

Black August of that year was focused on SQuAD shit, for
me. I was fasting, studying, training, trying to figure out how
to establish a revolutionary network that would actually cen-
ter the defense of Black trans women and transfeminine peo-
ple. I was pulling together comrades from across the gender
spectrum to struggle and build with them on this “Anarkata”
wavelength that SQUAD was tryna build from on the ground.
Anarchist niggas against racial kapitalist ableist transmisogy-
noirist authority. That was how one comrade put it, to tie it all
together, and tie to Black trans women’s liberation. I was talk-
ing with cats from throughout the world, Black Autonomous
Radicals from North, South, Midwest, overseas. My uncle let
me come stay with him during this time, so I had a measure of
stability and that animated me to put in work for this SQUAD
shit, I started to make my Black August focused on trans liber~
ation history. This is when I found out that Marsha P Johnson
was born during Black August. August 24th, One of the many
holy coincidences during this sacred month.

Marsha P Johnson was one of my biggest inspirations. She
was a revolutionary Black trans woman who co-founded the
first trans woman of color, sex worker led labor organization
in United States history, the Street Trans Action Revolution-
aries. She was badass. She said “we believe in picking up the
gun” She was fierce and fine, always looking gorgeous. She
once said “Star people are beautiful people” She was also a
performer and a poet. One of her most famous works was a
spoken word piece called “Soul.” Marsha struggled with men-
tal issues, and even admitted to Sylvia Rivera once that she
had focus/attention issues (she may have been neurodivergent).
Marsha was also religious. She talked about how she had mar~
ried Jesus because “he never laughed at me” Her and the STAR
girls also practiced a Catholicized form of African spirituality,

61

which they would use to protect themselves as they organized
and hustled the streets. They struggled to hold down free hous-
ing for homeless trans youth and to raise funds to get trans folk
out of the prison system. They had three chapters in the United
States and one overseas.

Learning to honor Marsha during Black August really be-
came like the last piece in a puzzle I was slowly putting to-
gether about who Iam, about my destiny, about who I am sup-
posed to be and what I am here to do. I began to identify as
“nonbinary” during this time period, because I realized that it

was more than just not conforming to gender for me, [had an
affinity to Marsha P Johnson, especially because in a lot of the
pictures I saw of her, she was wearing flowers like I did. And
she was dark skinned too, Yet, I felt like I was alittle too Brick
to actually claim trans womanhood without being seen as an
outsider or a liar. I tried to make sure SQUAD was modeled
on what Marsha did through STAR, though. Supporting street,
houseless folk, the prison struggle, class struggle, having a firm
anti-imperial and anti-colonial outlook, a critique of the med-
ical industrial complex and military industrial complex, and a
spiritual as well as artistic center. We would host “Kritical Kick-
backs” that were like a mix of an open mic night with a political
education session. And when we were out, we'd pour a liba-
tion and do ring shout, to get that ancestral communion going.
With my comrades we pioneered the “liberation ritual” which
is like an Afrofuturist performance that mixes hip hop, soul,
storytelling, theatre with revolutionary theory and conscious-
ness raising, Liberation ritual is basically a secular ceremony
(hence the name) and is supposed to call forth a sense of el-
evation or uplift in your body, while inspiring revolutionary
consciousness. I was remembering that Marsha had said that
nothing mattered if you ain’t had Soul. Liberation ritual was
about Soul,

62

Coming out of Black August and going into the fall, things
began to get tiresome for me. Iwas working again but not mak-
ing nearly enough to survive or save. Iwas taking on mad jobs.
Organizing around trans self defense and mutual aid was burn-
ing me out. And I had trauma I was burying. The trauma from
being harassed was catching up to me, but also the trauma from
being kicked out of home, and the traumas from the past, from
my childhood, things that I buried and forgot and told myself
Thad gotten over....it was all coming back, Plus my health: the
back pains, the insomnia, the itching. It all had gotten worse
and I never once went back to the doctor about it.

But I kept acting like I was strong, like I had it together,
like Twas okay, and just focusing on Anarkata shit, on trying
to help everyone else, especially other trans women and trans-
feminine folk, By the winter, one of my comrades envisioned
a temporary community center that we Anarkatas could host,
that was like an Afrofuturist immersion into our politics, and
wwe started putting in the work to get that built. It took a few
months of fundraising, telling folk about it, and getting shit
set up so we could have food, games, music, and to make sure
it'd be accessible. We brought kids with us when we finally put,
it together; we had self defense equipment and contraceptives
and zines and books and a free store for folk as well. SQUAD
held some liberation rituals, and workshops on mental health
with one of the other SQuADsibs. There was a film screening,
Pumzi by Wanuri Kahiu, and we used to open up discussions
about Black radical ecology. It was so beautiful. So enriching.
We had so many Black trans people show up, and so many
of them felt so honored and safe. It was actually pretty game
changing, The Left has historically failed the community, but
‘we Anarkatas was changing that, And yet I was still stressing
out at the event. I wasn’t satisfied; I was anxious. I remember
Jimi Love had to tell me to basically calm the fuck down. I en-
joyed myself but I was also really freaking out. Mostly I was
worried about one thing: safety. Safety for the gorls, safety for

63

the kids, Was everyone safe? But behind all of that, it was really
pain and traumas that I had buried, it was bubbling up again.

‘Then the pandemic hit. A virus that changed the world. Ev-
eryone thought the Anarkatas was gonna host another round
of events but we all got forced indoors. A “quarantine” Nobody
had predicted that was coming. Shit got terrifying. The streets
of New York emptied out in a way I had only seen in apoca-
lyptic zombie films. I remember one of my best friends called
me crying because they were out of the city and worried by
what they saw. I have no words for how chilling that season
was for me. It was like ice filled my bones. And I was already
not feeling great, and that coronavirus shit honestly just made
it worse, People were panic buying items from stores, throw-
ing themselves into weird conspiracies, preparing for the end
of the world,

And killing Black trans women. The death rates for the gorls
skyrocketed during the pandemic. If I'm not mistaken, 2020
was the worst year in modern history for Black trans lives
in the United States. Majority of those slain was Black trans
women, What did that tell me? I needed to do more with this
SQUAD shit. That was my immediate response. I was tryna act
like a hero; but really it was my traumas that I kept burying
that animated me.

Me and my comrades went so hard with the online political
education, coordination of mutual aid, tryna get masks and san-
itizer and funds and food moved around. Working hard to try
to make sure people could get by during a time when nobody
could really get by. Jobs was disappearing and everyone was
becoming homeless. And then Ahmaud Arbery, and George
Floyd, and Breonna Taylor died. And that’s when Black people
had enough. I heard the word of the streets. Black folk went
to the parts of the cities that had all the capital and nice stores
and they turnt the fuck up. Started burning shit down, Riot-
ing, Looting. They attacked police stations, cut the wires, burnt

of

them down, They threw shit at cops, set cop cars on fire. Pris-
oners rebelled and set things ablaze.

This wasn’t just in the United States either. In places like
Nigeria, folks were realizing that their government had locked
away supplies that was supposed to be used for covid relief, so
they looted. Many young queer folk in Nigeria were going up
against their police, who kept targeting them. In Brazil, there
were prison breaks, and protests against their fascist president,
and Black people were rising up there. Black people had been
rioting and protesting since before the pandemic, in places like
Sudan, Haiti, and elsewhere, but in 2020 it was like global Black
resistance just swelled and interwove. A Third Great Upheaval.
In the United States, it scared the shit out of white people. They
seemed to think for sure that every Black person was ready to
slit their throats.

It didn’t help that everyone had to wear masks too: now you
couldn’t see nobody face. I remember walking down the block
with my cousins, and if we were in white neighborhoods, the
white folk would look at us all skittish, as if they thought we
‘was about to avenge our ancestors by attacking them. This was
what the rebellions of 2020 had white people thinking. And so
they started tryna show fake love to Black people. Going to our
protests, and putting out little “we support Black Lives Matter
(now)" statements on every business and website and college.
None of them wanted to catch the heat so they had to act like
they was on our good side, And if they didn’t do that, then
they just got violent in response. Vigilantes were driving cars
into the protesters. And the cops were doing their best to do
a slew of revenge killings. They used military grade weapons
to suppress our people. Still, it didn’t stop our people. Black
people fought back so hard that many cops actually quit their
jobs, because their morale got so low. They were fighting an
enemy they couldn't defeat

White civilians began to act like the world was gonna end,
when really it was that Black people were rebelling against

65

their world, Rebelling because now it was like after all we been
through, here we are collectively suffering from a virus, and
nobody is outside due to that, and mad people are dying, and
becoming homeless and poor, and yall still find a way to kill us?
Fuck that, As one woman said in a video. “We did it yall way.
Now burn it down.” That was the word on the street. But the
gorls were still being killed. Black people were turning up on
the Man, but still kept finding a way to punch down and mur-
der Black trans women. It became unsafe for Black trans peo-
ple to go to protests with our own people, because our straight
counterparts would deadass turn around from rebelling just to
attack us. I remember being on the train after being at a march
(a peaceful demonstration, by the way) and this straight man
looked at me and my SQuADsib and was just like “see the rea-
son why God is using the cops to kill us is because of that com-
munity.” It was one of those “this generation is calling wrong
right and calling right wrong, and God is not pleased, and so
judgement is here” Attacks on the community from our own
people deadass skyrocketed as the contradiction between Man
and the so-called Negro got hotter and hotter in the summer of
2020.

And, make no mistake, white people was doing it too: they
literally started saying in the media “transgender Black Marx-
ists are trying to destroy the United States” They literally put us
at the center of the rebellion. As this continued to happen, the
harder things got in the work I was doing with my comrades.
I remember being at a protest and I was the one that a cop and
some local politician got violent with, not my comrades. Me,
the transfeminine one.

During this time, that was the label I started going toward.
Black August came along again, and I was starting to wear
dresses now. For the first time ever. I had never considered do-
ing, but had had a dream, In the dream I was transfeminine. I
felt it was time to explore that in reality. My first dress was this
beautiful black colored joint that had green, yellow, red, blue,

66

orange jewels all over it. It was the exact color of my vision
from all those years ago, the one I saw when I first pondered
the Divine, My gender was cosmic effluvia that day. I was a star
queen. The second dress I wore was this white skirt, and I put
on a pair of wings, and I wore a fringe necklace over my face,
and I started to tell people I was one of the people who could
fly. A femme queen, warrior queen. It was scary to claim that
for myself though. I had kinda always had a feeling, and truth
be told, some of the trans women I had organized with would
always clock it for me, but I was deeply terrified to speak that
out loud. Transfem? In a world that is so dangerous for us?
And indeed, that Black August, I experienced so much
street harassment it was wild. Even at protests and actions
and events me and my comrades were doing, random folks
on the street felt entitled to come near me, to touch me, to
express sexual interest, to stare at me, And while I had been
through all of these things before, the regularity with which
it happened and the fact that it was because of only one
reason: my trans womanhood... that shook me up bad. But
I continued to act like I was okay. Like I was strong. I could
handle anything, Iwas the Brick Cunt, the bitch they threw at
Stonewall at the cops. I was bold. The wild thing Man cannot
house. I remember when I would say to other gorls “I cant feel
fear’ It wasn't that I couldn't feel it, I just didn’t let myself feel
it. [kept saying to myself “don’t panic, organize” Fight. Fight.
Fight. “Are you okay?” People would ask me. “You're scaring
me” I told them I was okay. I wasn’t. But I thought I had to
say that I was. To be that trans heroine that I didn't have...
And that's what it was. All my heroines were dead. Some
part of me thought I was supposed to be too. That all it was
‘was to live as a beacon of subversion and then disappear into
the grave, Cuz aint that how it was for Marsha? She's only
remembered for her resistance, not her humanity, right? Isn't
that what we deserve? Because we are descendants from the
priests and shamans and witch doctors of ancient Africa!

or

Right? What about Mary Jones? New York City. During slav-
ery. One of the earliest Black trans women in the US record.
Caught stealing to survive. They called her the “man monster.”
Aint that all we are? We show up in the record only as rebels,
only when we demonized, and then we forgotten right? Right?
Same with Frances Thompson. Memphis, Tennessee. Just after
slavery. How do we hear about her? Resistance, right! She's
testifying at the federal level about the white ra
visited upon her and her community. They also misgendered

‘ist terror

her, using her transness to delegitimize the truth of her story!
And then she fades from memory. That's the only way we
know her: a rebel, and then she dies!

Who else? Other trans and gender variant women, queens,
mothers: Zaz Nova, who was also at Stonewall with Marsha
P. Or the gorls at the Compton Cafeteria Riots, which happens
before Stonewall and was an early example of Black trans
rebellion. Known only for heroics, and also forgotten. William
Dorsey Swann, one of the first recorded drag queens in US
history. Also resisted the cops. Also known for heroies; also
forgotten. Crystal Labeija, who pioneered modern House
ballroom culture because why? Protest. She was upset at the
racism and colorism in the usual drag balls. So, she imple-
mented a new institution for our community. Then she dies of
health complications and so many people don't know about,
her or her contributions unless you've been in Ballroom. Even,
as ballroom hits mainstream attention, The gorls are here,
we fight, we are forgotten, and then the only thing we are
remembered for is our resistance. So why live for anything
else then? Why live for shit when the only thing that will
matter when you are gone is what you did to save everyone
else right? Right? So fuck self care! Fuck acknowledging that I
wasn’t okay, that I was unwell, that I needed help, that I was
scared. Fuck my traumas and shit. Fuck that, right? Because
itd be forgotten!

68

In the Bible, Jesus once spoke about a sign of the end times,
when the Buzzard would come. Many early Christians inter-
preted this symbol as representing God's messengers. In the
South, during slavery, when African people died in the field,
and were left to out to be eaten by Buzzards, some enslaved
folk developed a ritual called the Buzzard Lope, where they
connected the Buzzard to Jesus, and would mimic the move-
ments of the Buzzard, in honor to honor those who had died.
In the Yoruba religion, there is a story about how the Buzzard
‘went up to heaven to intercede on behalf of humanity, and re-
store the earth from a crisis. This Buzzard was a manifestation
of Oshun, the orisha of waters, of fertility, of femininity, and an
orisha who they say is the guardian of queer, trans, gay people.

T mention these things because coming out of Black August
during the fall of 2020, as [was falling apart, and my godmother,
a daughter of Oshun, came to me, and let me know that I wasn't
okay. That I needed to take a break. And that it was okay to do
so. And in that time period, she asked me to be her daughter.
She asked to take me under her wing. To let her teach me how
to navigate these apocalyptic times and nurture myself. To let,
her teach me how to properly honor those gworls who had
died, And to let her teach me how to connect with the Divine
and ride for my people in a real way. She taught me that being
real is about taking the bad and the good in life, and finding
it worthwhile to actually try to live in this world with them
both. And not just live with both, but create something from
that complicated life. Actively. For myself. Not anyone else. For
‘me. To not lose sight of the personal stake I had in everything
Iwas trying to do, but to both honor it and actively center it.
Because that's the only way to be conscious of the inner needs
that everything else is acting on behalf of,

So I became Bl3ssing Oshun Ra. I became BI3ssing Oshun
Ra, so I could learn how to create a legacy that was more than
just how I would be remembered once I died. [became BI3ssing
Oshun Ra because I needed a living heroine to learn from. Re-

Co)

member when I said that in African traditions, it was the el-
ders that helped one with aligning their inner head with my
destiny? The elders are important not simply because of age
or even experience but because of the wisdom they should
carry and pass down. Divine power is acknowledged within
all things, but it is apportioned like a web with certain meet-
ing points at the nexus of consciousness. Ritual serves to fa-
cilitate meditation on that fact, an alignment that has ethical
implications. And the point of this mysticism was to help with
reaching one’s highest self, their fullest potential,

Now, with my godmother's input I could learn how to cre-
ate a legacy that was truly meaningful, because I had a living
legacy to learn from and apply to my own struggle. This was
the missing piece I needed. I could learn how to fly better now,
and to walk like a Buzzard, to honor our community, and to
connect with the sacred and advocate for my people, because
Thave someone to guide me, Without a living legacy, one is
without a struggle to carry out.

Ineeded an intergenerational connection to understand my
trans womanhood in a more humane fashion. At the core of
what she taught me was something the Combahee River Collec-
tive once said all Black women must learn: to be levelly human
is enough. My godmother taught me what it meant to begin
rejecting queendom and pedestals. Yes, we can understand our
spiritual and political history, to be the ones who can fly, but
we are also human. We fly and we resist and we grasp roots,
and we invoke spirit and build society and pursue our needs in
the environment and all these other things that are true of our
people for no other reason than that we are humans respond-
ing to varied conditions, good and bad, large and small, and
trying to make the best life of them to meet our needs, That
levelly humanness is important to how I am beginning to align
my inner head now. That levelly humanness is how we become
cognizant of our needs, personal and collective, large or small,
and act on them,

70

My godmother teaches me what it means to touch the
stars, She helps me better understand what gender self-
determination looks like at the personal level. It's not just
about a transition or who we love, although it can include
those things. It's also about how we form community bonds.
It's about rejecting the hierarchies our parents taught us and
creating motherhood based off respect. It's about fighting to
occupy land and defending ourselves from the pigs and the
Man, like my godmother did at the Christopher Street Piers
It's about not being told by the master how we use our bodies
or our labor. So it’s about not being confined to the plantation.
It's about choosing to build ourselves and our people up in our
‘own way, and not just in a way society says our bodies are
“supposed” to, It's about defending ourselves, our community.
But it's also about personal dignity. A personal definition
of things. She helps me examine my individual place in this
journey, as well as the collective vision of things. I talk with
her, laugh with her, listen to her, and then I reflect on my
inner relationship to this struggle. What does my heart tell
me? How do I feel? She is always asking us that, And that
becomes a question of who do I model my femininity and my
womanhood after? After my birth mother, who I'm so similar
to, who is like me in so many ways, but who also had to
harden herself in the face of a fucked up world. And where did
she learn her womanhood from? Her own birth mother, who
‘was hardened in the jungle of misogynoir too. Is it healthy for
me to pattern it? To live in self-neglect? If not, what would
best help me feel whole? And treat others as whole persons
too? Because maybe my birth mother struggles to accept me
because she hasn't gotten the chance to be levelly human
either!

‘These kinds of questions I started asking myself because of
my godmother’s guidance. And it helped me soften up. I had
begun to see myself as just a ferocious ass bitch. I would say
that I was a rough bitch, tough bitch, a thug, a soldier. That I

n

‘was just a descendant of the warrior queens and shamans from
Africa, and nothing further. And my mother would celebrate
these things, but she would also ask me to be more fluid, like
water, and to shapeshift, like those who turned into Buzzards,
and to ask myself about what other ways of being human are
available to me in this journey. Including softer ways. Ways
that were less militant. Newer ways to escape the chains forced
onto my mind and my body. Ways that might even be apolitical.
‘Tobe levelly human is enough. If the people who could fly used
their powers to get free by any means, that also has to include
normalcy, the mundane too. I'm trying to understand how the
destiny my inner head points toward is a full experience in this
‘world, that includes but isn't limited to the spiritual or political.

For example, I learned that it was okay to cry because of
my trans godmother, This was part of learning to fly, to nurture
myself, to walk like a Buzzard, to honor the slain, to connect
to the divine and ride for my people. Part of this is to actually
let tears fall, to start bawling, and just let it out. Gorls like me
don't do it because people will take advantage of your tears.
So Thated crying. But I also needed to learn how to open up to
my fullest, human experience, and embracing its possibilities,
even despite the hardness and bitterness of this world.

So, earned to embrace softness. learned to embrace love.
‘This was something else I struggled with. I hated the feeling
of caring for someone in an intimate fashion. Even sitting and
watching a movie with family members was too much for me,
was scary even. I did not like to let people get close to me be-
cause I was so accustomed to just moving on from things, hav-
ing to be ready for the next crisis or change in my life. But my
godmother taught me to fly by opening to my fullest, human
experience, and embrace its possibilities, even despite the hard-
ness and bitterness of this world. Again, being real is about cre-
ating life within both the bad and the good. So I also learned to
ask for help and let people look out for me instead of trying to
handle everything myself all the time. I felt alone and isolated,

2

like nobody else felt what I felt or even cared or understood
or empathized, I went around, then, just trying to carry every-
thing. Carry, like an ant who told herself she was Atlas. I tried
to carry so much I broke my psyche, I swear. I felt like I had to,
like there was no other option, but my mother taught me to fly
by opening up to my fullest, human experience, and embrace
its possibilities, even despite the hardness and bitterness of this
world.

And from that, I learned to become hungry and thirsty for
life, too. I hadn’t always wanted to keep living. Remember, I
felt like life was a war: that’s all it was to me. And Ihit a point
where I looked forward to the day I would die in the midst of
combat.

1 still struggle with this, But my godmother helped me de-
velop that desire to create my life, defend my life. She helped
me begin to see my future more clearly, and work towards it,
not just the collective vision, but my personal stake in it. To
be levelly human is enough. I would say that my godmother
helped me rediscover the value in holding onto that part of
things that feels like a secret between me and the Creator. The
beautyful things. She taught me to fly into a place of murtu-
rance, to walk like the Buzzard, honor the fallen, connect to
heaven and defend my people in a real way: a way where I
have not forgotten to open myself to my fullest, human experi-
ence, Where I have embraced all its possibilities, including the
mundane ones, the regular ones, the normal ones. Rejecting
pedestals.

So now I been going to therapy. Now, I been going to the
doctors. Now I been taking small steps to check in with my
health, Now I been wrestling with my traumas, fears, pain,
rather than suppressing it, Now I been figuring out the kind
of future I want for myself as I get older. And what things I
will take with me to the grave, things that others may not re-
member, but that are worth it anyway because I was the one
who lived them, and I was the one who defined them, and I

3

‘was the one who made sure they happened. Memories, laughs,
good vibes. And even mistakes, foibles, errors, bad times. Small
things. Apolitical things. And perhaps, in the end, these are po-
litical things too, just of a different kind.

It hasn't been easy, though. Learning these lessons. Being
levelly human, My godmother has to remind me all the time:
“remember to put the oxygen mask on yourself first” Because
I tend to forget. And I get riled up and wrapped up and bel-
licose and self-neglectful and ready for what comes of that.
Or I get stuck tryna be perfect, or tryna be heroic, stuck on
the pedestals, which is really to say, stuck trying to be an ab-
straction, stuck trying to be what I think everyone will remem-
ber me for, rather than simply living and letting my legacy be
what I and the universe and God decided regardless of what
anyone else said. Gender is, in the Black world, a territory of
cultural (or spiritual) and political maneuvers (as Saidiya Hart
‘man once said)~and we must fashion those in a revolutionary
direction... But there is a personhood and being who makes
those maneuvers we must discover and honor. A vulnerable
soul who flies not because she is reducible to spirit o resis-
tance but because she is a complex human responding to the
conditions forced onto her. Honoring that humanity is essen-
tial to balance. When we hit the grave, what will follow us is
our levelity, and that matters so much. But it can be so hard to
remember. I'm struggling with it right now.

It is Pride season at this point. And Juneteenth is here, and
finally getting attention in ways it had not before. Finally, also,
folks are acknowledging the real origins of Pride: that it wasn't
white people, but Black rebels, the same people who brought
chattel slavery to an end with a general strike that caused the
Civil War. These forms of acknowledgement from the ruling
class are only happening because white society is still scared
after the rebellions of 2020. Still tryna pander. Still worried that
wwe gon turn the fuck up on them. And they are right to be

4

worried. The Third Great Upheaval is still happening, it hasn’t
stopped. The same city in which George Floyd was Killed is ris-
ing up against militarized policing as we speak. Conservatives
have introduced dozens of new laws against reproductive au-
tonomy and trans rights, asa direct response to Black rebellion.
And they are trying to legislate our history out of the school
system, Brazil, Colombia, the UK, Haiti, and elsewhere, Black
folks are rising up against class, racial, and gendered violence.
In Ghana and Nigeria, Black queer folk are still being repressed
and on the front lines of struggle for right and decolonization.
And another prison strike could happen in the US.

As Black August is getting ready to come back around we
must remember these things. I will hit my fourth fugiversary,
then, my fourth year on this lifelong journey. Another season
of study, solidarity, spirit, and struggle. I'm looking forward
to the occasion for fasting and shouts and building with my
people and discovering and defining and determining who
am and why Iam here. I want to make sure Ihave a more bal-
anced head on my shoulders this time around, though: that’s
the goal. To practice that, with the help of my godmother, my
ancestors, our rituals, our myths, the root-grasping science that
is Black radical tradition, and a pursuit of my own choices, soft-
ness, brokenness, weakness. My own levelly human experience,
a life that creates itself within the bad and the good, the big
and the small. Holding onto that very mundane fullness is as
important to running away from what was forced onto me as
is the political pursuit of self-determination, or the spiritual
aligning of my inner head with a higher truth (collective des-
tiny and personal self-definition), or working to meet my mate-
rial/metabolic needs and connect to this planet. Iam beginning,
to learn that Ican only ride the winds if I'm levelling myself at
the same time.

15

“Throw my body anywhere
In that ole field

‘Throw my body anywhere
In that ole field

Dont care how you do me
In that ole field

Cuz my savior choose me
In that ole field

You might beat and bang me
In that ole field

But my savior choose me
In that ole field

‘Throw my body anywhere
In that ole field

‘Throw my body anywhere
In that ole field”

Epilogue

“When I have a child,

Iwill hang pink petals against
her black shoulders

And tell her to fly

She shalll spring before

the moon, with mosses
baptized in dew

sparkling against her
charcoal-colored flesh”

~ Prof.Ound
In African traditions, nine is the number of the wind, a
symbol of change, transformation, and revolution. This piece

had nine reflections with that in mind, to mark the nine days
from June 19th, the celebration of emancipatory struggle for

16

Africans enslaved in the United States which culminated in
abolition of chattel slavery and ongoing resistance to racial cap-
italism; leading to 27th, the night before the beginning of the
Stonewall riots against police led by working class Black and
other colonized trans, queer, nonbinary, and otherwise gender/
sexually variant street kids, which culminated in an expansion
of civil rights and Black Power struggle that continues today.

‘The ruling class has begun to use Juneteenth and Stonewall,
to make simplistic claims where Black resistance is co-opted
into the success of the capitalist imperial project. What comes
next is continued degradation of Black people especially the
Trans, queer, gender/sexually variant, LGB+ community be-
hind the guise of progress, coupled with immense criminaliza-
tion of anyone deemed a threat to the nation or nuclear fam-
ily. Despite this, our culture is being given a spotlight and the
promises of assimilation are supposedly now being extended in
our direction, under the auspices of acknowledgement about
the brutal history we have faced and fought against. And so,
the need for Marronage as a framing for Black transfeminism
is more prescient than ever, in reclaiming our spirituality, our
radicalism, and our levelity. Tokenization, fetishization, hyper-
visibility, alongside discrimination, harassment, and violence;
these are two sides of the same coin and they will only inten-
sily pressures on Black QTGNC life, especially in the form of
transmisogynoir.

Our community will have to rise up again, in the face of
this. It will not be because we are spiritual or political abstrac-
tions but because we are people, made into sojourners by an
accumulated historical process, and its material conditions. In
order to prepare for what is to come, we must remember our
evelly humanness and we must also remember that study, sol-
idarity, spirit, and struggle are among the tools by which we
must holistically affirm that for our unique selves. To the ones
who can fly: I will see you in the whirlwind.

7

Suggested Resources

78

Sunrise

1. The Importance of Ori

2. New Names, Old Gods: A Look at Seekin Rituals in Pente-
costal and Gullah Religions

3, Mourning in Trinidad: How Spiritual Baptist, Orisa, and
Ifa Traditions Converged in Laventille

Midday

1. Hoodoo Religion and America Dance Traditions: Rethink-
ing the Ring Shout - Katrina Hazzard-Donald

2. The Two Head Manifesto - Yahya Toure

3. Revisiting the Legend of Flying Africans - Sophia Nahli
Allison

4. Drums and Shadows - Works Progress Administration
Sunset

1, African American Ring Shouts

2. The Kongolese Saint Anthony

3. Queerness and Candomble

4, Esw is not the Devil

5. The Priest and the Prophetess

Midnight

1. Marcus Garvey - Look for Me in the Whirlwind

2. Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organiza~
tions 1960-1975 (Muhammad Ahmad)

3. Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-
Century Revolutions (Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad, Ja-
mal Joseph, and Sekou Odinga)

4, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Sunrise

1. Toni Morrison on Flying Africans

2. William Dorsey Swann

3, Senzala 0 Quilombo - Pedro Ribeiro

Midday

1. The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon)

2. Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon)

3. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle” (Wynter)

4. “What Will Be the Cure? A Conversation with Sylvia
Wynter”

5. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
6, “Towards a Vibrant and Broad Based African Anarchism”
7. “African Socialism Revisited” (Kwame Nkrumah)

Sunset

1. The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in
‘Time Perspective - Edith R. Sanders

2. Strivings of the Negro People - WEB Du Bois

co

80

3, Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race - Samuel
Cartwright

Midnight

1. Die Nigger Die: The Political Autobiography of H Rap
Brown

2. Revolution by the Book - Jamil Al-Amin
3, Mojo Workin - Katrina Hazzard-Donald

4. Run, Mary, Run - Rashida Bumbray

5. Assata: An Autobiography

Sunrise

1. Soledad Brother - George Jackson

2. The Roots of Black August - Shaka At-Thinnin
3. “Transphobia is a Respectability Politic”

4. “Pan African Revolt for a New Century”

5. “Femme Queen, Warrior Queen”

6. The Combahee River Collective Statement

7. “To The Ones Who Can Fly: Message from the Whirl-
wind"

The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

Nsambu Za Suekama
‘My Gender is Marronage
ARevisitation
30 June 2021

Retrieved on 17 December 2022 from redvoice.news

theanarchistlibrary.org

and father and your days will go well with you because your
parents have the power to make your life a living hell if you
dont” He more than once threatened my peace and financial
safety, and eventually I was forced to leave.

I remember what finally sparked my stepfather's decision
to send me packing. We were having an argument about poli-
tics and religion. We had never agreed on these things, because
my stepfather is a right-winger, and so we often debated each
other, and this time around it got really really really heated and
my stepfather started telling me that I did not have the Spirit
of God because of my gender variance. I kept trying to stress to
him that that could not be true because God wanted Black peo-
ple to free ourselves. My father kept trying to use Scriptures
that told people to obey their masters, and started saying that
“government exists for the lawless and insubordinate” And so
now I was letting him know that this government and its police
‘was a tool of the colonizer and slavemaster, and that nothing
about me and what I was saying was unholy. This is when my
mother started speaking in tongues and trying to exorcise me.
‘That night they both backed me into a wall, and Iexploded with
rage, and I said some hurtful things, and it got so bad one of
my brothers stood up ready to defend me because he thought
Iwas gonna get hurt by our father.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. I et the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then T exhale, Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down’

‘The wild thing was now unhoused, and had to pack their
bags and find a new place to go. Couches, cars, small rooms,
crossing state lines by bus, I started to live that street queer
life then, which so many other Afro-trans and Afro-queer folk
know too well, especially us trans gorls and trans fems.

23,

The wild thing then tumed to political theory to better un-
derstand herself, like Senzala 0 Quilombo from Pedro Ribeiro:

“[E]very once in a while, a laborious and dedicated
group of slaves would defect from the generosity
of the slave master’s whips and chains and senza-
las, and go into the jungle. They would run, day
after night after day after night, into the mata,
deeper into the forest; away from the treacherous
Capitaes to Mato, the black or mulatos overseers
responsible for capturing escaped slaves. In the
jungle, they looked for hope. In the jungle, they
looked for freedom. In the jungle, away from the
white man, they looked for the Quilombo.
Quilombos were city-states created in the heart of
the mata by escaped slaves. The most famous - the
largest and the one whose name was whispered in
secret in the dark by those in search of freedom -
that was Palmares. Palmares had a estimated pop-
ulation of twenty to thirty thousand, structured in
eleven different villages. In Palmares, as in other
Quilombos escaped slaves held the majority. Na-
tives and poor whites were also accepted into the
Quilombo, with and shared the same rights and
duties as anyone else, Decisions where made by
village assemblies, in which every adult, man or
woman, of every race, could (and most would) par-
ticipate.

No, Palmares was no utopia. It was no communist
society in which the decisions where as horizontal
as possible and in which all were seen as equal.
Palmares had chiefs, one for each village. The chief
of the capital, Macacos, was the king of Palmares.
But this is neither here nor now. The now is the
quilombo as opposed to the senzala.

24

Palmares died in flames. It fought until the
last person was dead. It had been fighting
for its sovereignty and independence for over
‘one hundred years. It gave its blood to defend
what it cherished most ~ its freedom and its
self-determination,

Whatever drove the Palmarinos to fight is what I
am interested in talking about. A friend of mine
said something that struck a cord in me. He said:
‘People are always talking about dying for this or
that. You gotta die for the cause if you are militant
enough, if you are really bad ass you should die for
your beliefs. But nobody asks, what are you living
for? Not dying, but living - what is your life for?”

‘The Palmarinos were living for something. They
were living for their freedom and their collective
autonomy. They were living for their right of self-
determination, to do away with the chains that
held them slaves in the past and to decide by them-
selves the path of their life. If they died fighting for
that, they died for what they were living for. They
died the death of free people”

My father thought things would turn into a “prodigal son”
story and I would run back to his threshold, knees bent, asking
for forgiveness, promising to obey him and obey his god and
ultimately align with the white social standards and backward
political opinions he and my mother held to so deeply. But 1
‘was fully committed to running as far away from all that shit
as possible. Aint nobody or nothing was gon hold me down,
cuz Twas fierce and I was proud.

My life did not get any easier from that point at all whatso-
ever, but there is nothing quite like the bravery and confidence
to face struggle that you get when you listen to who you truly
are within and against it

25

“Foot bone, shin bone
‘These bones gon rise again,
Shin bone, knee bone
‘These bones gon rise again
Knee bone, thigh bone
‘These bones gon rise again
Tailbone, back bone

‘These bones gon rise again
Back bone, neck bone
‘These bones gon rise again,
Neck bone, head bone.
‘These bones gon rise again”

6. Tukula (Thursday 24th June)

There was an Afro-Caribbean revolutionary named Frantz
Fanon who once said that each generation, out of relative ob-
scurity, must discover its mission, fulfill or betray it. Self dis-
covery is not just a spiritual journey, but a scientific one. The
‘Man knows this, that is why they always use religious narra-
tives or narratives derived from studies of nature to make us
align our inner heads with their bullshit.

Narrative is powerful because the brain has behavior reg-
ulatory mechanisms, which produce chemicals that we fill in
with symbolic meaning about what is right and what is wrong.
‘These symbols and their ethical content are based around the
historical experience of what activities meet our culture’s ba-
sic metabolic needs, and what activities may not help us do so.
When tied together, they create neurochemically salient narra-
tives that consciously reinforce the behaviors which a culture
defines as necessary for it to reproduce itself in its given envi-
ronment, We depend on nature, and we have to find ways to
transform our relations to it in order to get food, water, safety,
shelter, and more; but the actions it takes to do this may or

26

may not be beneficial, and even if itis valuable to one person,
it might not be to others. Some way, people have to create a mu-
tual agreed upon set of understandings about what works and
doesn’t work, in order to sustain socio-ecological interrelations
over times, and this is why every culture develops myths that
have two traits. They are often based on observations of natural
phenomena, animals, plants, ete and they convey

‘This same impulse doesn’t just happen when the narratives are
spiritual either; it also happens in the sciences, and it is why
scientists often talk about “nature” as a way to explain societal
relations, politics and economic issues. We are nature and nur-
ture beings, and narratives, both spiritual and secular, are used
to encourage the actions, behaviors, and divisions of labor and
skill which serve a particular culture's ecogenic (environment-
inhabiting or “world developing’) structures.

However, some cultures or people in power can come along,
and impose their specific systems onto another people, in order
to achieve their own selfish, destructive material interests, like
stealing land and owning folk as slaves. Their labor is exploited,
and the web of interrelations they share with each other and
nature is disrupted, and this causes a metabolic rift; and it is
bad for the environment because we become subordinate to the
‘master’s interests in profit over life and sustainability. This pro-
cess also has a cultural effect too. They will completely rewrite
that subordinated culture’s narrative, and make them believe
and follow something that is foreign to them and that serves
their own domination. These imperial cultures use religion or
science to make it seem like both the coercive narrative and
the systems they reinforce cannot be changed. Everything be-
comes fixed. It is black-and-white. The Word becomes flesh.
Right is right, wrong is wrong, You are sexually immoral: you
deserve slavery. This is the situation facing Black trans people.

We either internalize the curses they put on us, or we follow
the destiny laid upon our inner head, which we chose, which
‘we define. Oftentimes, the enslaved and colonized ends up do-

moral lessons.

27

ing both simultaneously, believing one thing about ourselves
and believing another all at once. A double consciousness. For
Black trans people in particular, it feels like dysphoria in our
head. It's like there is a veil between us and the rest of the
world; we try to struggle against it to get to what we need so
wwe can live out who we are. But the world that is forced onto
us makes us feel lesser, and they alienate us and seek to control
us, and will redefine how we understand ourselves so we will
be too scared to act on our own interests. We end up striving
against their narratives because the inner head is tryna get us
to our higher, truer selves. But, the world that is imposed on us
says something is wrong with us as individuals. There is noth-
ing wrong with the system, and the world they created; it's just
swe who are bugging, and our brain is warped, They blame it on
“phylogeny” or “ontogeny” They try to lay hands on us, or run
tests on us, to measure and “cure” us of a distinct wavelength
in our brains.

But, we are not broken. We are responding naturally to hos-
tile conditions, by trying to nurture a new way of inhabiting
the planet. It is a problem of “sociogeny” Our brains are trying
to implement an alternate set of mythically reinforced instruc-
tions than the ones pushed onto us. Those other instructions
the living legacy, the ancestral power, things that African hu-
man beings have been doing since before colonization and en-
slavement, things which call for a more egalitarian mode of
existence, such as Black trans folk determining our own gen-
ders. Our inner head remembers and contains these alternative
understandings, even if itis not that conscious to us at first.

Sylvia Wynter is an Afro-Caribbean woman scholar who
theorizes the scientific side of self-discovery. She says that the
way a people becomes more conscious of their symbolic affir-
‘mation is through rituals. She points to indigenous Kongo so-
cieties in Africa as an example of how this is done. Whenever
the community was under threat, she said they would use initi-
ation ceremonies to reinforce themselves. So while mystically

28.

speaking they would align their inner head with their destiny,
scientifically speaking they would immerse themselves in the
truths of their societies that were developed to uphold their
culture's ecogenic (environment-inhabiting) structures. Kimpa
Vita did this and that was why she ended up pioneering an
Ali:
Antony of Padua. The conjurors and rootworkers in the Hush
Harbor did this and that is how forms of anti-slavery resistance
got developed in their sacred spaces. In Haiti, a prayer cere-
mony was held at Bois Kayiman, conducted under the guidance
of vodun priests, one of whom encouraged the Africans gath-
ered there to turn away from the Man’s god and “listen to the
voice of liberty in your hearts” This helped spark the Haitian
Revolution, the world’s first ever successful slave revolt, and
established the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.

Ashanti Alston, a Black revolutionary, observes that in the
Yoruba religious context, rituals devoted to deities like Ogun
teach our people:

sovereignty movement through appeals to the Saint

“automatically, you have the right to rebel!
and second, ‘you must now prepare and transit
through an unavoidable hell to acquire the pow-
crs, insights, skills, and unities necessary for you
and the community to move to the ‘liberation
Hilltop?”

‘Then, there were some Africans who, as they became en-
slaved, turned stories about the trickster into ways for our an-
cestors to critique the Man in secret. The trickster was a door-
way to higher truths, remember, and that included the right
to rebel. For example, there's a ring shout song called "Move,
Daniel,’ that isa trickster tale disguised as a praise song. In this
story, Daniel goes to steal food from the master’s house. The
other enslaved folk noticed that the slavecatchers are coming,
for Daniel, so they start singing instructions to him on how

29

to escape, They use the song so that it can be assumed by the
slavecatchers that they were just worshipping.

Enslaved people would then use this ring shout song to
commemorate that story, but more importantly, to reinforce
their right to rebel, to steal if necessary, in order to get what
we need.

Ibelieve that Black trans people deserve to create our own
ways to affirm ourselves, on our own terms. When we dress as
we please, and shape ourselves as we please, when we name
ourselves as we please, those to me are all ceremonial acts. It's
the way we breathe life into ourselves, get in touch with our-
selves how we see fit.

But we also need to grasp this reality at its root, to trans-
form it, Fannie Lou Hamer once said that this is the technical
‘meaning of “radical” As the people who can fly, we are not just
descendants from spiritual rootworkers; we must use the peo-
ple can fly myth to remind ourselves about what it means to be
political rootgraspers. More than just an ancestral connection
to the wilderness, we need a material connection to nature to
get free. We must transform our ecogeny, by transforming the
mode of material provisioning through transforming the mode
of production, which is a question of class. All our ancient rit-
uals and spiritualities were in some way eco-centric, because
of a connection to more communalistie modes of production.
Kwame Nkrumah once said the task today is to harness the
spirit of those traditions into a revolutionary project. We must
look to power not just from sacred forces in the earth, but build
power from below and through the margins and in self determi-
nation based on revolutionary mode of inhabiting this planet
and using its resources. It's in these two things, both myth and
matter, that we will most fully determine ourselves by our au-
thority, in order to resist the Man and these coon ass straight
and cis people (even our families) who wanna keep us bound.

30

“Rest, believer, rest
Daniel

Rest, believer, rest
Daniel

Fly, believer, fly
Daniel

Fly, believer, fly
Daniel

On the eagle wing,
Daniel

On the eagle, wing
Daniel”

7, Luvemba (Friday 25th June)

I remember there was a gitl in elementary school who
started a whole trend with the other girls where they would
say “stop lying” but in a very nasal, sassy way, and drag
their vowels with it. And I remember following right along,
no question about it. It was fun to do, especially when we'd
all wag our head at somebody, cut them off while talking.
But unlike the other girls, it was an issue if I did it. Someone
like me wasn’t supposed to enjoy feminine stuff. For one, the
teachers didn’t like the ratchetness anyway; but now you have
to add a queer into the equation? Straight people can't tolerate
having another reason for the whole collective to be seen as
wrong, Society already said God was punishing us for being
criminals and having broken families and apparently the “gay
agenda” was making it worse for us. That is how the oldheads
put it,

But being told I was “gay” was confusing. I mean, yes I
liked men but I also liked girls. I also realized, however, that
I found myself drawn to anyone: I liked tomboys and mascu-
line women, tomgirls and feminine men, and people who didn’t

31

seem to fit any of these things. My attractions were not neces-
sarily romantic or sexual though. I remember there was this,
girl who lived next door to me and we used to hang out and
play together all the time, My parents suggested I had a crush,
on her. Then there was this boy I went to school with, and same
thing. always wanted to be around him. Somebody in my class
accused me of having a crush on him. In my head, though, I just,
liked being near them. There was an attraction, but it didn’t re-
ally have a name. I used to get compared to SpongeBob. He
was technically asexual, being a sponge, but everything about
him was gender and sexual fluidity. Whenever kids would talk
shit about the show I found myself feeling like I used to have
to defend SpongeBob, and really I was trying to defend my-
self, Even when I was in relationships with girls, I found my-
self being scrutinized, because I didn’t feel straight. But T also
didn’t feel “gay” I didn’t have any terminology like “bisexual”
or “nonbinary” or “transfeminine” at the time. Everything was
just “gay.” Ivemember one time this teacher deadass pointed to
me in the middle of class and tried to out me in front of all my
classmates. Any time I tried to be like “no, I'm not, it wouldn't
work because people felt like I was lying or being inauthen-
tic. And in some ways they were right: saying I wasn’t “gay”
wasn’t exactly true. It was so confusing.

One time, my mother told me that what would save me from
all of this was if I just leaned to “man up.’ I think that was
when I realized how wide the chasm between me and my mom.
was. Prior to that, I had felt an affinity with her, a unique close-
ness that was more like I saw myself in her. We were already so
similar: same music taste, mannerisms, likes and dislikes, and
even now we relate on a number of things. But she doesn’t ac-
cept that resonance as valid now just like back then she didn't
seem to fathom that what I was facing was wrong on part of
everyone else.

My brothers tried to teach me how to “man up”: for example,
pressuring me into doing shit like catcalling or running game.

32

felt so out of place, so weird, so uncomfortable, and so anxious
in those moments. It was like I wanted to climb out of my skin
and just have my soul shot away into a black hole or something.
Hiked girls, but not in a manly way, and definitely not on some
player shit; and yes I liked other genders, I was realizing, but
again, I didn’t feel like a man in liking men. I couldn't quite
name what it was, In actuality, I didn’t feel like anything. It
was neutral inside, so much so that there would be times when
my peers would say or do things and literally have to explain
to me that gender was the reason why they did it. Those rules
didn’t click in my head; they felt foreign, alien, beyond me.

Some of the double standards I heard growing up were also
just down right goofy. “Boys can't use straws,” was something
my grandmother once said. And then, all the stuff people said
“boys” could do just so happened to be racial stuff. That was
what really started making me question gender. I peeped how
race was shaping the way people talked about it, and that shit
ain't make no sense. How one day we talking about Martin
Luther King and Malcolm X and slavery and how Black peo-
ple had to fight against Jim Crow, and how wrong that was,
but then the next thing you know, folks are laughing at the
way white men walk or don't walk compared to Black men,
and then saying that white men were less masculine. Or they
were saying that white women were more feminine than Black
women,

“Then after saying this, folk would turn around and tell me
that because I was Black, and not white, I wasn’t supposed
to be feminine. Literally. It dawned on me that white people
were literally allowed to explore gender and sexuality in ways
Black people could not. And that's what I saw in the media:
white folks, doing “gay” things. Society legit felt like Black peo-
ple were only allowed a rigid standard of male-man-masculine
and female-woman-feminine. I swear, it was only because of
this realization that I came to know my African culture and
dark brown skin as “Black” (which is to say, that there was

33

any stigma attached to my body and being as an African per-
son). The color line was first etched into my awareness only
because of gender.

Iremember feeling like Jim Crow did not end for me then. I
still had to endure being called “boy” even when I didn’t want
to, Ihad to endure being called a government name I wanted
to reject. I had to watch how I walked, how I talked, how I
held my eyes or my wrist, to keep myself from being bullied
or even attacked. There was a constant anxiety and heaviness
in my body and made me feel like my consciousness was start
ing to split up. I found myself compartmentalized, just to cope,
shrinking myself into shards.

Especially because there was always the threat of Divine
judgements too. Hellfire. I constantly felt like T was battling
spirits, when really I was suppressing myself. Prayer felt like
‘warfare and it was laborious and terrifying. They called me
a “travailer” in church because of how heavy I prayed, how
my tears would fall like blood. There's no way to express how
pained my chest would be coming “out of the Spirit” How
many nights I woke up in fits and fear, quaking and babbling
in tongues trying to pray away what I thought was tormenting

One time my mother explained it to me like this: that gen-
der variance and sexual variance was demonized in the Bible
because of an association with heathen cultures. The people
of God were chosen to be “set apart” from such cultures, and
therefore this meant prohibitions against homosexuality and
effeminacy as part of their spiritual devotion.

The problem is, as [eventually learned, heathen and its asso-
ciation with “sexual immorality” always meant “African.” See,
long ago when the Bible was written, a story was recorded
from the Hebrew people about Noah, the man who built an ark
to preserve his family and many animal species from a flood.
According to the narrative, after he and his family and the other
living creatures got out the ark, Noah got drunk and passed out,

34

naked. Now, Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
Ham ended up seeing his father’s nudity by mistake, and so his
two brothers covered their eyes, walked into Noah’s tent back-
wards, and then covered their father up. When Noah got up,
he knew what had happened, and he got angry with Ham for
seeing his nakedness, and decided to curse Ham's son, whose
name was Canaan. In ancient Hebrew cultures, your firstborn
son was the one who inherited your legacy, so to curse Canaan
‘was to impose a curse on Ham's entire legacy. Noah said, “a
servant of servants shall he be” Canaan was doomed to be
enslaved. There is no literal truth to this story. Some schol-
ars believe this story was developed to explain why there was
conflict between the Hebrew people and certain other ethnic
groups in ancient Palestine.

Religious leaders, however, began to use this story to
explain how humanity had gotten divided into racial group-
ings. There is a map that was made during the time of the
ancient Roman empire. It depicts the Middle East and Asia as
being descended from Shem, and it depicts Europe as being
descended from Japheth. And it depicts Africa as being de-
scended from Ham. Because these religions taught that Ham's
legacy, through his son Canaan, had been cursed and doomed
to be a “servant of servants” this meant, in the minds of many
Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religions, that Africans were
all supposed to be enslaved. This is the origin of anti-black
racism,

To top it all off, since Noah only cursed Ham because Ham
supposedly saw him naked, followers of these religions began
to associate African people with sexual immorality, sexual pre-
dation. Today, when people think of Blackness, they think of
hypersexuality and physical prowess, they think of us as ani-
‘malistic in these ways, and there is a long history of Black men
and Black women being painted as sexually threatening and de-
serving of violence because of it. This goes back to the “curse
of Ham” doctrine.

35

‘There is a veil between us (Black) and them (white), and
gender/sexuality is like the needle used to stitch it together, to
keep the submissive knee-bender in line, to keep us seen as the
Hamite, and justify their right to dominate our land. Blackness
is therefore understood in a rigid, binary gendered fashion as
the way to qualify our savagery and uphold their pursuit of
African resources.

‘The veil established then pulls a wool over your eyes. You
end up believing the narratives put on you. Black people start
to really believe that we are what white Man religion says we
are, And then, for the trans girls and other gender variant folk,
awe end up feeling dysphoric. Or maybe we just feel worthless.
Ugly. Despicable. This was me.

Scared, I said maybe my brain is messed up. Imean, I do feel
split into two different directions. Two worlds. I don’t know. I
see what I saw in the spirit and then I see what is in the mirror.

Maybe that means I am crazy. Maybe I do have a disor-
der, My consciousness does feel split in half after all. Maybe
I can only ever be what they say our bodies are: man, straight,
woman, straight, right? I must have been wrong. My body is
wrong. My mind is wrong. Maybe I am worthless. Hamite. Sin-
ner. Abomination. Tranny. Fag. Nigger.

Irun from myself. I'm always fleeing. It's never a moment
rest in my spirit. My mind is racing daily. I'm being chased.
Snarls are at my back. I am worthless. I am despicable. I run.
I can’t rest. I run, Doors and walls are in my way. I have to
break them down. I can’t break them down. I run into them.
Bust through. I scar myself on the way but it don’t matter. I
can’t feel pain, I'm not supposed to feel pain. I just run, I cant
rest. I'm not supposed to rest. I run,

T'm being chased through a narrow, filthy, dark alleyway,
and the only measure of safety is to keep going, I am despi-
cable. I can’t rest. I run, If I can't run then I must fight, Fight
the enemy. Fight every battle. Or fix every problem. Try. Til
it overcomes me. Overtakes me. Wears me down. I drown. If

36

can't run, Imma drown. If T can't drown, Imma grind, If T can’t
grind then I'm numbing myself somehow.

I fall to the floor, and I can't get up. I'm broken. And I want
to fly up out of here but I just can’t. Fight or run; the only
two options. Run or fight. No rest. No escape. I am a slave. I
am a descendant of those the Europeans had dragged to the
Americas and the Caribbean and elsewhere in chains. And it
aint just the Word that says this of me, but also the science, so
it must be true,

Something about the environment in Africa had changed
our skin black, and that same environment caused us to be sex-
ually immoral, and lazy, and deformed our cultures and to this
day our environments, whether it's the village or the hood or
favela or the barrio or the reservation: it doing the same thing.
Proving that something is wrong with us.

In the United States, one of the scientists to point this out
‘was a man named Dr. Samuel Cartwright. Dr. Cartwright was
noticing that there were a lot of runaway slaves, rebels. Many
enslaved Africans got off the plantation, or they chose to slow
down working in the fields on purpose, or they broke one of the
tools, or they attacked the masters, or they killed themselves
so that the Man would not have anyone to exploit. All of these
actions would disrupt the flow of money and resources that the
‘Man was tryna gain off our backs. The masters needed a way to
puta stop to this constant resistance. First, they tried to use the
Bible to tell us that we needed to be obedient to their rule. But,
when that was not enough, their scientists came along to say
that trying to resist slavery was evidence of a mental illness.
Yes, Dr. Samuel Cartwright taught that the desire to get out of
our chains was nothing but a “disease of the mind” and that it
needed to be “cured” in order for us to re-align with what he
said was God's will.

‘The cure, according to “Dr” Cartwright, was for slavemas-
ters to find a way to balance not being too nice or too harsh.
Master had to follow a middle ground in order to use the power

37

over Black people that God supposedly had “willed” for him. If
s/he was too nice, it would make African people see ourselves
as human and want to run away; so the master had to exert
just enough brutality over us, according to Dr Cartwright, and
not let us think we were equal to them. If s/he was too cruel,
though, it would make African people sad and upset and ready
to run away; so the master had to give just enough crumbs
to us, according to Dr Cartwright, just enough comforts, basic
physical and material needs

“If treated kindly, well fed and clothed, with fuel enough
to keep a small fire burning all night-separated into families,
each family having its own house-not permitted to run about
at night to visit their neighbors, to receive visits or use intox-
icating liquors, and not overworked or exposed too much to
the weather, they are very easily governed~more so than any
other people in the world, When all this is done, if any one of
more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to
a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own
good require that they should be punished until they fall into
that submissive state which it was intended for them to occupy
in all after-time, when their progenitor received the name of
Canaan or ‘submissive knee-bender””

Flash forward centuries later. Our contemporary context.
Slavery is no longer legal; it was abolished after the Civil War
in the 1800s. But the US Constitution says that if someone is
convicted for a crime, then they can be forced back into it.
White society did not stop at the opportunity to begin creating
new laws that ended up criminalizing Black people in mass
numbers. This was a sneaky, legal way to force us back into
chains. When they could not jail us, they would claim that
without slavery, we would “revert” to our savage and sexu-
ally immoral, Hamitic ways. This way they could use Christian
hate groups like the KKK to lynch us and worse as a form of
non-legal punishment outside the prison, Over the course of
decades, the prison system became used to target us specifi-

38

cally, and has grown to become a source of labor for a num-
ber of corporations and produce goods for many towns, and
provide jobs to white folk who want to be police and corree-
tions officers and guards (aka modern day overseers and slave
catchers). As outrageous and evil as this is, Americans refuse to
abolish the prison/police/court system that is just modern day
slavery disguised, and they continue to use narratives about
sexual immorality/predators (the Hamitic hypothesis) as the
excuse for why.

‘They might not say it is about race anymore, either. They
will disguise it by talking about “violent crime? and fear of
predators, and talk about the IQs and “cultural pathology” of
these mysterious, immoral figures. It is a back door way to con-
tinue the dehumanization and demonization of Black people.
At the same time, they still give the promise of equal rights.
They still put up listings for a 9-5 so that you think you have the
opportunity to get on the grind, even if the wages are piss poor
or they fire you for any old reason or abuse you on the job. They
still promise some degree of health coverage to get by, even if
it ain’t the best or it is hard for most of us to access, or the doc-
tors intentionally harm or neglect you. And they still promise
us housing and education and water and food and soon clean
air, even though the housing is substandard and dangerous and
filled with poison, the education is underfunded and full of lies
and violence, and the water and food and air is full of toxins
and harmful chemicals

“They keep that balance between giving us some things, and
controlling us in other ways. Just like Dr Cartwright said. And
it is a bonus if you live in two parent homes they say, with
a straight, cisgender man in charge, and where everyone be-
lieves in white Man religion and is devoutly aligned with it,
and everyone talks and dresses “proper” like they do, and ev-
eryone looks somewhat close to or almost as light and thin and
delicate and “normal” and “human” as they do. These are the
ways to keep us governed, and if you step outside them, well

39

then you deserve what you get. You deserve poverty and police
abuse and poison/pollution and political/economic oppression
if you don’t meet their standards; you deserve poverty and po-
lice abuse and pollution and political/economie oppression if
you live in a broken or extended family; you deserve poverty
and police abuse and poison/pollution and political/economic
oppression if you are not Christian; you deserve poverty and
police abuse and poison/pollution and political/economic op-
pression if you don’t talk proper or dress proper; you deserve
poverty and police abuse and poison/pollution and political’
economic oppression if you are dark skinned or if you are fat,
or if you are rough or tough or hardened and mistrustful and
on edge and anxious and angry because of the bullshit we deal
with; you deserve poverty and police abuse and pollution and
political/economic oppression if you don't look or act “normal”
or “human” by their standards, And yes, according to the nar-
rative, you deserve poverty and police abuse and pollution and
political/economic oppression if you are not straight or cisgen-
der.

And so, the veil comes back. In the looking glass, when I'm
brushing my teeth. It pulls the wool over my eyes. The veil
comes back, when they use the pronouns I don’t accept. Or
when the paperwork speaks of a “biological sex.” Or when they
use that government name, that sla
like, the name I inherited as a mark that Iam someone's “son.”
And it pulls the wool over my eyes.

And the veil comes back, yes, even when I claim who Iam.
Even when I feel like I pass, even when the mirror don’t bother
‘me, when I feel fierce and fabulous, when folks accept my pro-
nouns, or even when they use my chosen name: the veil still
comes back anyway. When they don’t hire me for the job, they
disrespect my intelligence, it pulls the wool over my eyes. The
veil is back as they stop and frisk me, as they treat me like a
Thing, as they force me onto a grind that feeds their pockets
but bleeds mine out, and as they keep me trapped in a world

re name, the name I don’t

40

that feels too much like a plantation every day, and they deny
me housing, and as they jail me.

‘The veil is there again in all these ways and I cannot escape.
And its wool comes over my eyes and makes me start to won-
der again if | am bugging after all, and they are right. Maybe
I deserve this. Maybe I should not have transgressed. Maybe I
need to bend my knee. Maybe I need to obey. I have so many
reasons to already be seen as worthless, why add queer and
trans to the equation?

And so the veil, stitched together with the wool of gendered
prohibitions, calls me back to the prayer Closet. So I can bend
my knee again. And align myself with their narratives. But
there is an anointing on my head. It's saying something about
who I'm called to be.

‘There is an anointing on my head, and it's not a disease of
the mind at all. It's not a pathology. And it ain't demonic. It's
an ancestral calling. A higher truth. And it's something our
bodies have always made a possibility, and even when I'm not
fully conscious of it, it’s pointing me to something outside the
self that I need to do to get free. It tells me not only to run, or to
fight It tells me to balance myself. To find out who I am here to
be. And journey to create and establish that, and in so establish-
ing, to pursue the role I want to play in this world, When I lis-
ten to this, I start to pull the wool off my eyes, see past the veil,
even if just a little bit, and there's a higher truth there. Some
kind of horizon of liberation for us all. And when youcross that
line, you find not just something ancestral but also something
for the future. Some other world, perhaps, where one class of
beings doesn’t dispossess the earth of everyone else, keep us
subordinate to a profit motive, dominate our very bodies, op-
press our consciousness and desires, poison our lands and wa-
terways, and control our autonomy. Istart to lean into this, and
while it feels like it is opposite to “reality” I know that if I act
on it, I can synthesize it into this world, make the vision more
real, and make reality closer to the vision. So I start small: I

41

know that in that world I dream of, I am a mother, and I am
sitting down with kids, and I'm telling them the story of how
we as a people got free.

“Jubilee, jubilee

Oh, my lawd

Jubilee in the morning

My lawd, Jubilee

Jubilee in the evening

‘Oh, my lawd

Jubilee, jubilee

‘My lawd Jubilee

Dont care what you call me
Oh, my lawd

Shout my children, cuz you free
My lawd, jubilee”

8. Musoni (Saturday 26th June)

Iwas reading about Imam Jamil Al-Amin. The Black Power
revolutionary. He was once part of the Black Panther Party,
a self-defense formation that arose in response to racism and
the class war. He was also part of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, an organization from the civil
rights era that eventually became more radical because of the
influence of folk like Ella Baker and Kwame Ture. Baker, Ture,
and SNCC began to understand that the Black struggle in
the United States was connected to a global struggle against
capitalism and imperialism, aka the Second Great Upheaval.
Imam Jamil Al-Amin was known as H. Rap Brown during
those days, and he, like many Black revolutionaries of that time,
was constantly being framed by the government and police for
crimes he did not do, The US government, the ruling slavemas-
ter and land-stealing class, intentionally sent agents to either
infiltrate or set up Black activists and organizers, even pacifists

42

like Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King wasn’t even as militant or
radical as many of the others during those days, but the Man
still saw him as a threat, and they eventually killed him because
he became critical of capitalism and imperialism like the revo-
lutionaries were. Imam Al-Amin was able to survive that era,
however, something that a lot of Black radicals did not do un-
fortunately. He became a Muslim cleric and community leader,
and while he did not renounce his radical polities, he was not,
as engaged in more militant activity any more, at least not pub-
licly. Yet, the US still continued to target him, try and set him
up, trying to connect him to terrorist activity and associate him
with the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Anyways, I probably shouldn't have been reading about
this before bed. I felt like I needed to, though, especially be-
cause of the spiritual wisdom that Al-Amin teaches, One of my
favorite things reading about and from him are these words:

“To be successful in struggle requires remem-
brance of Creator and the doing of good deeds.
This is important because successful struggle
demands that there be a kind of social conscious
ness, There has to be a social commitment, a
social consciousness that joins men together. On.
the basis of their coming together, they do not
transgress against themselves and they do not
transgress against others”

1am not Muslim, but any time I read from Muslim revo-
Iutionaries like Al-Amin, not only am I impressed with deep
respect, but there is something in me that flickers, like a page
in a book turned by a wind. It is probably because ring shout,
despite being rooted in African traditional religion, had Islamic
influences, In the 1930s, Lorenzo A Turner was a pioneering lin-
guist of Southern Black Gullah cultures, and he connected the
use of the word “shout” to the Arabic word “sha'wt” The sha’ wt

43

refers to a circular movement around the Kaaba, the most sa-
cred site in the Muslim faith. Whenever Muslims pray salat,
and face toward the East, it is because of facing toward the
Kaaba, Circumambulating the Kaaba is something the faithful
engage in when they make the mandatory pilgrimage known
as the Hajj. The Islamic “shout” is a ceremony done in commu-
nity, seven times, and is supposed to represent oneness, from
what I understand. But I am no expert.

What I have gathered is that it was translated to the African,
traditional religious context in the United States because of
Christianity and enslavement. The Shout therefore became a
site of “syncretism? where various faiths and cultures inter-
acted with each other. Since it was a circular ritual, it was com-
fortably adopted into the perspectives of the various African
ethnic groups who valued the circle in their cosmologies and
beliefs. Katrina Hazzard-Donald talks about how the circle was
one of eight elements in a larger “African religion complex"
common to various African cultures, and that became the reli-
gion of Hoodoo in the United States. Here, beyond just being
a ceremony for the remembrance of God, it was also a ritual of
ancestral veneration, to remember those who came before us
and the wisdom they pass down.

I remember watching a Christian woman discuss her rela-
tionship to a ring shout. She said something about how it al-
lowed her to honor God through reflecting on what he did for
her people in the past. This is most certainly a residue of the
African religion complex, because in African traditions, it is
through the ancestors that one derives their initial understand-
ing of Creator, African traditions value learning from the el-
ders; ancestors are seen as your first spiritual elders. Africans
from among the Fon, Ewe, Igbo, Bantu peoples, Yoruba peoples,
Mande peoples, and various other backgrounds, were able to
create community together in the hush harbors, and combined
their contemplative and medico-magical traditions through it
that allowed them to resist. The ring shout was one of the cen-

44

My Gender is Marronage

Nsambu Za Suekama

30 June 2021
Contents

1, Kala (Saturday, 19th June)

2. Tukula (Sunday, 20th June)
3. Luvemba (Monday 2ist June)
4, Musoni (Tuesday 22nd June)
5. Kala (Wednesday 23rd June)
6. Tukula (Thursday 24th June)
7. Luvemba (Friday 25th June)
8, Musoni (Saturday 26th June)
9. Kala (Sunday 27th June)
Epilogue

Suggested Resources

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4
18
26
31
42
55
76
8
“History isn't something you look back at and say
it was inevitable, it happens because people make
decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of
the moment, but those moments are cumulative re-
alities” - often attributed to Marsha P Johnson

‘The following is a series of reflections based off a coming out
letter I wrote to my family in 2017. It aims to outline a Black
revolutionary anarcha-transfeminist project known as “Gender
‘Marronage.” The purpose of this document is to revisit themes of
the original letter I wrote to my family in the spirit of what Ihave
grown to understand about myself and my history since then. Ul-
timately, I would like to invite others to reframe their African-
trans and African-queer identities beyond liberal understanding.
Gender is a question of self-determination,

1. Kala (Saturday, 19th June)

African traditions say that when we are born, a vague sense
of who we are to become, or what we are meant to do in this
‘world, sits in our heads, guiding us. We make choices, we lean
toward certain things, we express certain personality traits, be-
cause there is an anointing on our metaphysical head pointing
us to a sacred role in history or society which those things help
us get toward.

‘Think of it like in that cartoon Avatar the Last Airbender:
when Aang was tiny, the elders held a few toys in front of him.
Each toy represented one of the four nations and elements, wa-
ter, earth, fire, air. Aang immediately gravitated toward the toy
that was associated with fire, which allowed the Air Nomad el-
ders to know that in a past life, Aang was not an Airbender but
a Firebender (the preceding element in the cycle). It was his
impulse which indicated to the elders that Aang’s destiny was
that of the Avatar, who gets reincarnated as a member in each
nation to restore balance in the world through mastery of all,
four elements.

Now, in our ancestral practices, a child would be born, and
the elders would observe certain habits, likes, inclinations, and
responses to their environment. They knew based on sacred
teachings that these traits and behaviors and impulses were
indicators of what divine calling the kid might have had upon
their head. So they provide the ritualized pathways for one to
begin to step into this personal truth, and journey toward their
higher self. Then, the devotee would live out a spiritual walk,
contemplating myths woven around natural phenomena and
human activity, with each ritual and meditation and magical
working as a touchstone for becoming clearer on the destiny
that one either chose or was given by God upon entrance to
this reality.

In the Black church, when folk go off to fast, or to seek (for
the Gullah) or tarry (for the Pentecostal) or mourn (for the Spir~
itual Baptist) and when they interpret dreams or visions or the
Scriptures or everyday life moments, with a focus on trying to
discern (or divine) God's will for one's life in particular, this is
an expression of the African mystical complex. For Black trans
folk in particular, however, I think our ritual is the act of flight.

I remember my first time flying. There wasn't elders to
guide me. I was often on my lonely as a little kid. My mother
always thought I could handle being by myself a little more
than my brother. How I remember it, I was in the living
room one day, by myself, just walking, quietly, reflecting,
soaking in. And the sweetest light was pouring in from the
fire escape window, a golden drip from the sky. And the house
is vibrating with the thronging voices of a choir that played
from the radio. I was caught up that day. I started shuffling in
acircle, going around and around, looking up at the ceiling, as,
the gospel praising was pouring into my skin like the rhythms
our ancestors would stomp into the wood floor of the praise
houses. And I saw a vision in those days: I saw a black expanse,

6
vast yet endearing, deep as the dark shrouds in the sea where
no human has gone but those who jumped over. And scattered
all throughout this canopy of cosmic shadows, there were
versicolor shards, flecks of blue and green and yellow and
purple and pink and orange and red light hanging like angels
around, carrying the chorus into the presence of God. ‘This is
how I conceived of the sacred.

“Oh yonder come day,

Yes heard em say

Yonder come day

Oh [heard em say

Yonder come day

Yeah, I heard them say

Day has broken into my soul
Yonder come day

Iwas on my knees

Yonder come day

Iwas on my knees

Yonder come day

Iwas on my knees

Day has broken into my soul
Yonder come day...”

2, Tukula (Sunday, 20th June)

Taint learn til much later in my life that what I experienced
in the living room that day as a youngin was not just me con-
templating the freedom in the gospel message. I was engaging.
in a form of ancestral remembrance.

See, long ago, when African people were brought here in
chains, they used to sneak away from their captors. Go into
the woods, the shadows, to shuffle in a circle too. They were
tracing the four points of the Sun, from when it rose, to when
it was high in the air, to when it set, and then to when it was at

7
rest on the other side. They let the mysteries of this cycle shine
into their consciousness. They created a worship and praise
experience, and invoked wonders from nature and the afterlife
that allowed them to understand their suffering. These were
traditions brought over from the Motherland.

Many of them sang spiritual songs that helped them store
these meditations in their hearts and minds. They would reflect
on God and the message of Christ from this lens, with a focus
on both liberation and salvation, Others used this as a way to
pray in a more Islamic fashion, placing an altar before them to
circumambulate or go around it while meditating, still with the
same liberating objective.

Or pots would be placed at the center of the ring, to collect,
the sounds of these chants, so that the master couldn't hear
what was going on, but also so that they could capture the
miraculous energies they were shaking up into a vessel, like
a charm. Those who had canes or walking sticks would use
them to beat the ground, while others were stomping or clap-
ping or miming and using hand signs. They would dance and
be quickened by an ancestral power, manifesting the promise
of the world on the other side of the water ~ Africa, but also,
more symbolically, the realm of the dead, and those who were
considered closer to the Divine, those who were at the origin
of humanity,

‘They had dreams and visions of resistance because of
this Afrocentric religious complex. It was known at times
as a “Hush Harbor” Some of them, like Harriet Tubman
and Nat Turner, allowed these unctions to guide them while
they resisted slavery, planning rebellions and acts of escape
through it, And many of our modern Black artistic creations ~
including non-religious creations like the blues, jazz, hip hop,
ete... all of it was made because of these secret ritual spaces.

Those who were most committed to this mysticism were
called “the people who could fly” They were respected, revered,
held in high regard. They were demonized, though, and to this,

8
day, white Man religion calls African faiths, music, culture,
healing practices demonic. This is because it is all associated
with those who were most likely to rebel: the runaway slaves,
the ones who “hit flight” and got off the plantation, who could
no longer be held as property and have their labor forced out
of them,

One of the most well known “people could fly” stories is
traced back to the Georgia coast, which was where a huge num-
ber of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States were
dropped off. In this particular event, it was a crew of Igbo cap-
tives from Nigeria, who decided they would rather drown than
be slaves. The enslaved Igbos fought the masters and then dove
into the sea, hoping to return to the ancestors, and therefore,
back to Africa, The legend has it that as their bodies sank be-
neath the surface of the ocean, they were tumed into Buzzards
and flew away.

My first time hearing about these “people can fly” stories
‘was from a little children’s book we had lying around when I
‘was small, There were these beautiful illustrations inside, of
Black folk rising into the sky off plantations. There was an
elder; his name was Tobi, which is short for a word meaning
“God is great” in the Yoruba language of West Africa. He would
go to the other enslaved people and whisper a proverb in their
ears from the Luba people of Central Africa: “kum bumba yali,
kum bumba tambe. Kum kunka yali, kum kunka tambe” It
meant, “if the master gon fool us, we gon fool the master. If
they gon play our heads, we gon play theirs too.” This idea of
trickery was always a reference to African spiritual practices:
Hoodoo, rootwork, and conjure. I would later learn from
‘one of my trans sibs that back in Africa, there were spiritual
leaders called chibados who were what today would be called
transgender. My sib let me know that the chibados came from
Central Africa, which happens to be where a lot of the beliefs
and practices in Hoodoo come from. And then my sib let me
know this: basically trans and other gender variant Black folk

9
who were reconnecting to our ancestors, we were like the
inheritors of a legacy from these ancient African priests. In
other words, as Black trans and queer folk, we are the people
who can fly.

“Sister, sister, you come down.
Down to the mire

Come on down, down to the mire.
Lower, lower, in the mire.

Low, chile, in the mire

Down, chile, to the mire

When you bow, in the mire.

‘Then you rise, from the mire.
Higher, higher, in the mire.

You shout around, in the mire”

3. Luvemba (Monday 21st June)

That day in my living room as a kid, shuffling in praise,
stands out in my memory because it remains a classic exam-
ple of how I once lived my life. There was a sense of elevation
or uplift at work inside me all the time. I was always waiting
on the Divine, and mounting up as if on eagle's wings. And
the furthest thing from my mind was the idea that my body
had any limitations attached to me just based off how I looked,
how I was shaped. I was fluid and free and fabulous and fierce,
and I didn’t live with much fear at all.

‘The shuffle dance is known as a Shout, by the way. It's
not about yelling. The name is based off an Arabic word be-
cause some Africans were Muslim when they got brought here
in chains, The tradition comes from indigenous African reli
gions, though, old old old practices, deep in Bantu-Congo cul-
tures at the heart of the Motherland. In these lifeways, the peo-
ple would gather together under the guidance of ritual leaders

10
known as ngangas, and through movement they would med-
itate to get in touch with their higher self. Sometimes they
‘would consume herbs to help induce this state of contempla-
tion or trance, and it would allow them to receive messages
from the ancestors in their journey of self-discovery.

A large percentage of the Africans brought to the Ameri-
cas as enslaved people come from Congo/Angola heritage. This
is why a lot of Black folk here, while they are Christian, will
dance in church and still call ita “Shout.” And during these cer-
emonies, they will encourage each other to “think about” (or
meditate) on “what God is doing” for them, And it’s usually
presented as a mystical quest for personal fulfillment, an “of-
fering of praise” in order for “the blessings to come down’ in
terms of their hopes and dreams for healing or financial secu-
rity or more.

‘The Congo/Angola region was once the center of a pow-
erful network of kingdoms in ancient Africa, But in the 1600s,
right around when the Europeans from Portugal came through
with Christianity and slavery, the region was divided within it-
self and at war. In the midst of the turmoil, there was a nganga
who warned that if the people converted to white Man reli-
gion they would be enslaved. Her name was Kimpa Vita. She
was one of the first people to teach that Jesus was Black, and to
redefine the Bible in light of Black history. She called for unity
in her kingdom, and so the idea that Black people deserved to
assert a collective self-determination over our societal history,
on our terms, was pioneered by Kimpa Vita. You wouldn’t have
modern Black nationalism if not for her.

‘The church didn’t like her doctrines. They didn't like her
campaign against European authority. They claimed that she
‘was possessed by the devil. What is interesting to me is that
part of why they demonized her is because she claimed to be
possessed by a male Saint. This Saint was the patron of lost
things. Kimpa Vita had fallen sick and underwent rituals, and
in that process she received visions from this Saint, and suppos-

uw
edly she died and came back to life with his spirit and power
having filled her up. This was what inspired her to try to regain
the lost sovereignty of the kingdom and attack the church. And
she asked her followers to venerate the Saint who inhabited
her body, so that they could fight with her to regain the lost
kingdom.

learned about Kimpa Vita from an old trans homie. They
taught me that Kimpa Vita wasn't the first or last person from
Africa that claimed to be possessed by a spirit from another
gender. In fact, my sib told me other stories of Africans who
didn’t exactly fit the standards of today about manhood,
womanhood, and sexuality. I began to learn that there was a
long history of gender/sexwal variance in Africa, and it was
often connected to either spiritual traditions or histories of
resistance or both, Oftentimes, gender/sexual diversity was
seen in the myths and rituals related to deities. For example,
the rainbow was seen associated with a gender variant orisa
known as Osumare. The wind was associated with Iansa,
who was a woman but also seen as masculine, Whenever
people would venerate these and other deities, sometimes they
would come and inhabit the people momentarily, regardless
of gender. And the ritual leaders would actually dress the
possessed devotees up as these divinities, regardless of gender!
Men with womanly spirits; women with manly spirits; and
folks who didn’t fit either category being inhabited by spirits
that were also not held to those categories.

‘The church, unsurprisingly, called all of these entities “de-
monic” And attacked African faiths because of it. I remem-
ber learning about how when they would translate the Bible
into local African languages, they would intentionally use the
names of important deities as an equivalent of “Satan. in order
to delegitimize them. For example, Exu, who is a trickster. In
many African traditions, tricksters were understood as a gate-
way between humanity and the Divine, They were basically
like Jacob's Ladder. They opened up the pathways for human

2
consciousness to access spiritual knowledge, and for spiritual
power to enter human consciousness, Interestingly, they were
connected to gender/sexual fluidity, seen as what today would
be called androgynous, intersex, or even transgender, queer,
bisexual, ete, Exu for example is said to be gender variant. Of
course, when translating the Bible into Yoruba, “Exu” was used
for “Satan” Now the trickster becomes evil, rather than a holy
messenger like before.

‘The situation facing us as Black trans queers today is con-
nected to all of this. The general society sees us as tricksters,
as people who tryna fool them and play them. But they don’t
respect the higher truths we help usher into this reality. They
don’t want to hear us when we reveal what Africans used to
know well: that biological sex is an illusion and that both hu-
manity and deity exist along a spectrum. And they especially
don’t like to see that so many of us are involved in Black re-
bellion. Like Romaine-La-Prophetess, another gender variant
priest. He claimed to be possessed by a female Saint, and was
a central figure in the history of the Haitian Revolution, which,
‘was the world’s first successful slave revolt, and which kicked
off the First Great Upheaval against chattel slavery worldwide,
striking fear into the hearts of the Man to this day.

So we have Black gender/sexually variant people involved
inanti-colonial and anti-slavery movements. Black queer/trans
folk have also been involved in the socialist and anarchist and
feminist movements as well. First we challenge white Man re-
ligion, then we challenge white Man science and its medical
institutions; now many of us are challenging the government,
challenging the capitalist system, challenging hierarchical kin-
ship structures like our families, and other forms of domination.
This, quite unsurprisingly, makes us a threat in this society.
‘And that is why we get treated the way we do. It is not merely
hatred of our identities but rather an insistence on the world
order that has forced a good number us to fight back both for
ourselves and Black people as a whole.

1B
“What did the giant said?
‘Oh David!

Send me an upright man,
‘Oh David!

A man not afraid to die,
‘Oh David!

Arman that's fit for war,
‘Oh David!

I think I'll go back home
‘Oh David!

‘Think I'll go back home
‘Oh David!”

4, Musoni (Tuesday 22nd June)

I remember being tiny and coasting through my life like a
lil “futterby? The looseness in my hips, the relaxedness in my
wrists, a prance here, a skip there, gliding with an angel's sway.
Thad no labels to describe myself then; I was just me, with no
reason to hate myself. And as for God? I felt God whispering
liberty in my heart.

God was so close inside me that whenever I saw other peo-
ple praying or acknowledging God, I used to gasp and chuckle
out of surprise at the fact that someone else had a relationship
to God too. It was like realizing other people were in on the
best secret the universe could offer. Sometimes people would
see me in these moments and think I was laughing or making
a mockery of religion, but really it was me responding with a
sense of awe. There was not an irreverent bone in my body. I
used to be the one kid who never fell asleep in church, who sat
at the edge of my seat while the preacher talked, and who took
in every minute detail of doctrine and Scripture that I could. 1
remember when kids would come to me to get a better under-
standing of the Bible. And my mom says that I “accepted Jesus

4
Christ as Lord and Savior” as a toddler. This was all while see-
ing myself in the girl characters on television. Not one part of
me was convinced that God hated me for being who I was at
that time.

It was the bigotry that made me hate and doubt myself,
not God. When the yelling started. And the criticism. And the
name calling. And the scrutiny. That really fucked my shit up.
I quickly realized that my every act made me suspicious in the
eyes of men. The world was a dangerous place at that point,
where if I was not extremely cautious and vigilant, someone
‘would come for my whole life. And often times, they did it any-
‘way, no matter what I did. If put on music, my brothers would
say “you like girl songs.” I was into Miss Lauryn Hill, for exam-
ple, real bad, Cuz my mother played her a lot when I was just
born. One time, I was wearing a GAP shirt and then my broth-
ets came out of nowhere talkin bout some “that stands for Gay
American People! Gay American People! Gay American People”
Taunting me. Laughing. There was always so much laughter.

‘There was a kid in school who would always come up in
my face and flick his neck around and his wrist in “effemi-
nate” ways, in order to tease me. Everywhere I went, he was
there like an overseer, to keep me in line. On top of that, there
was the outright harassment. The threat of physical violence
and the actual experience thereof. I remember my first time
being followed into the bathroom. Elementary school. Some
boys were trying to chase me down and beat me up, and one
of them climbed on top of the stall, saying “Don’t worry, I'm
here to watch you" while I was in it. He made it seem like he
was doing it to protect me. It creeped me out and I can’t stand
public bathrooms to this day. There was another time a group
of boys followed me into the changing room, just to see what I
had between my legs, and then went off laughing and bullying
me afterwards. Finally, there was me being touched in ways I
neither comprehended nor agreed to... The first time that hap-
pened, I was told “this is what boys do” while my body was

15
used for someone else's pleasure and I had to sit there con-
fused.

I think the most memorable time some annoying ass gen-
der shit hit me hard as a kid was from my stepfather. It was
carly in the morning. I can't remember what was happening, I
just know he was helping me get dressed and cleaned up. I was
pretty close to him in those days. I remember him rocking me
to sleep and stuff. This particular day, I think he was trying to
put a shirt on me when he got odee mad and just yelled “You
have girl shoulders!” I remember it being said with such dis-
approval. My own family. My father. Those words still haunt
me to this day. They landed with such rancor, like shears that
dug right into my back. I think I stopped trusting him, feeling
comfortable with him right around that time, He started justi-
fying the things my brothers would say and do to me then too.
Like they would bully me and then I would run crying to my
father, asking him to make them stop and he would just tell
me that they were doing it because I “bobbled” my head “like
a girl” or because I “pronounced” vowels “like a girl” Shit was
disappointing. And heartbreaking.

talk about flying as a symbol for what it meant to align my
inner head, to embrace my truth, to walk in my calling, to stand
in my higher self as a young Afro-transfeminine person. I had

that power asa tiny tiny kid. And then people came along, and
they saw me riding high, and they snatched me out the air just
like the slavemasters had done to our ancestors back in Africa
And they ripped my wings out my back. Now, my shoulders
feel heavy, my body feels weighted down to the ground, and
1 feel ugly, and every day I question who I am, and whether T
deserve to be here or if deserve helifire, deserve death, deserve
destitution. And this shit is so hard that my mind literally starts
to feel like it is split into pieces. And I try to close my eyes, and
breathe in through my nose, and I count to nine, and Imeditate
on what it means to ascend again, and [let the air fill my belly,
and Itry to imagine myself rising in the wind, and then Texhale,

16
and count to nine, and I try to relax into the wind, and let it
lift me up, breathing out through my mouth, trying to relax,
and feel free, not like a beast of burden.

I think of flying in the wind, because Marcus Garvey once
spoke of a wind, It represented African liberation, and the an-
cestors. The Black Panther Party used to speak of the wind too,
to represent liberation and reverence for the dead. Malcolm X
says he heard his family talking about the revolution using the
symbol of a wind. In African spirituality, Iansa, the orisa of
winds, who is regarded asa masculine woman, gender variant,
her other name is Oya, “the tearer,’ and they say she represents
change, revolution as well. With these things in mind, I try to
remind myself that I don't have to bend my knee and submit to
anybody's authority, because I fly up in the whirlwind: which
means that I get to define myself, and I get to determine my
destiny, and I get to free myself, and to govern myself, and to
defend myself, and to understand myself on my own terms and
by any means necessary. It is sad that right in our own homes,
in our families, in places that are supposed to be sites of safety
and assurance and nurturance, our own people cannot see that
for us. A family should be supportive, not destructive.

“Oh, hold the baby,
Hold em

Hold the baby,

Hold em

Hold the baby,

Hold em, Lawd rock that have
‘Oh what's the matter?

Hold em

‘What's the matter?

Hold em

‘What's the matter?

Hold em Lawd rock that babe”

7
5. Kala (Wednesday 23rd June)

So, Ibreathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
‘ly; you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down” I start
to think about how Toni Morrison said that the “people could
fly” stories were a “psychological trick” that enslaved folk used
whenever they were asked about their spirituality. Itwas a sym-
bol for the runaways. Stories are such powerful things. They
might be false as hell, but people will hold onto them because
they reinforce an understanding that serves whatever agenda
they want to get done. To say that some of us could fly was to
uphold the agenda for Black freedom.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. I let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
‘fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

I start to recall an old dream Ihad, long long ago, when I was
super super small, [ don’t really understand or remember the
dream too well, but I know how it felt. I felt a thick, warm air
surrounding me, that seemed to lift me up, and it was so cozy
there, and dark like sunset, and I could hear something like
water in the distance, and something like laughter somewhere.
Whoever was there with me, we had gone off somewhere se-
cret, and we were doing something serious, something impor-
tant, something that was gonna change the world. And I felt so
free. So connected. So loved. So held. I didn’t have any of that
in the waking world, though. I was alone and cold and afraid
of the arrows flying at me throughout the day, and it was like

18
the world could not be changed. It was hostile. There was no
escape.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. Ibreathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

‘That song from Solange begins to play now. Where she talks
about tryna drink it away, dance it away, change it with her
hair, work it away, sex it away, sleep it away, read it away,
cry it away. I remember trying to do these things too. And I
remember trying to pray it away. I remember thinking that if
1 Bible-thumped properly, or if I befriended the right people,
or if [berated and bullied those who were like me, that would
help me deal, [also thought it would clear my head, but it ac-
tually knocked me further out of alignment. Who I truly was
became invisible and unrecognizable to me as I locked myself
in the prayer Closet.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
et my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
‘fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

African traditions say that when you not listening to your
inner head, things start to fall out of balance for you. Ask any-
one who knows me well, and they will tell you over time, I re-
ally started falling apart. I was all over the place, anxious and
restless, and then I developed anger issues, and I could not un-
derstand why. I would think that I was being attacked by spir-
its, and then if not, Ijust thought it was because something was
‘wrong with me. That my life was gonna end. That I deserved to
die. And I actually started to look forward to the day I would
meet my demise. I was tired. And ready to go. And sometimes

19
intentionally put myself in harm's way, hoping that I would
go out with a bang.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. I let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

Iremember when it hit a point where people started telling
me I seriously needed help. They kept encouraging me to start
trying to take care of myself, to love myself more, to honor
myself. But I did not listen to them. I could not even under-
stand what that meant, It made no sense to me, But my inner
head knew. A mentor of mine at the time would tell me about
Black queer/trans history, about where terms like “shade” and
“reading” came from; and some of the kids around me taught
me about vogueing and ballroom history, about Willie Ninja,
and the Xtravaganzas, and Crystal LaBeija who pioneered the
first house. And something bloomed inside me: such utter joy
and excitement. It exploded, and I adopted everything I heard
and internalized everything I saw, even while I was still telling
people that I was “straight” Not too long after, I made out with
a guy for the first time, an old friend. And then a few months
later, I was out with some old homies on a boat. And we were
having fun, and some of the girls started picking flowers and
putting it in their hair, and for some reason I felt inclined to put
some pink petals right into my high top fade, with no thought.
And we snapped a photo together, three girls: one of them
trans, me, Although I did not have that terminology to describe
myself at that time.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. I et the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And

20
then I exhale, Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
‘fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

‘The ridicule that came about soon as those flowers wound
themselves into my nappy head surprised me. People who had
insisted that I needed to find love for myself, were suddenly
upset. My parents kept bothering me about it, folks around me
were all curious and questioning me. There were stares and
comments; but, for some reason, my response was different. I
felt like nobody could touch me. had disappeared, into a whirl
wind or storm, into a secret and shadowy place, into the world
of my dreams and visions. And because of that, I remember
when folks started asking if I thought I was a “boy or a girl” be-
cause “only girls can wear flowers” and I just shook my head
and I said “Im just lost in the wild” None of them understood
what I meant, But I knew. I was reclaiming the tradition of the
maroons and runaways. I was learning to fly.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

I think my parents thought the flowers thing was a momen-
tary thing at first, but as I kept it up, the angrier they got. I
‘was buying new flowers, wearing different kinds. My head be-
came a garden, an arboretum, or a hush harbor of its own. I
disappeared into that ancestral communion. ‘This is what I ex-
plained to my stepfather when he insisted on asking me about
it. Lwould show him pictures of people in Africa who wore flo-
ral headdresses and decorated themselves with things from na-
ture, I reminded him that whenever our ancestors escaped the
plantation, they would establish Maroon communities, where
they would reclaim their African culture and spirituality, fight
back against the master, and build new societies in the swamps,
‘woods, forests, jungles, and the mountains. He kept asking me

21
what that had to do with gender and I could not even fully an-
swer the question myself at the time because I did not have the
words for it, All I knew was that it was connected, somehow.

Neither my mother nor my father was hearing what I was
saying. They tried to snatch me out the air like when I was
younger, but it did not work this time. The more flowers I found,
the more my wings grew in, and the bigger they got, the more
they stretched out and shone, and now petals and feathers were
falling around wherever I went. My shoulders felt light again,
dainty; I began to feel fluid and flowy inside, once again, like I
had when I was really small. Each new crown of flowers was
like ceremonial attire, and then I started wearing feminine jew-
elry and more feminine clothes, and eventually dresses, and it
all felt like I was channeling a divine energy. I was transform-
ing and I felt like cosmic effluvia, I was a star, a vibe, a baddie.

T breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. [let the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
et my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where hold the weight. inhale again. And
then I exhale. Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down”

‘The word “domestic
also means to colonize. It is connected to the word “domestic”
which refers to the home, and both of them are related to the
word “dominion” or “dominate” which means to rule or control.
I mention these things because as I was beginning to transition
into a little wild thing, my parents was not having that up un-
der their roof, and they did everything to preach against and
suppress me because of that. My mother told me that I was ly-
ing on God and tried to lay hands on me and called me heathen,
said Iwas giving glory to the creation rather than the creator.
She even told me that me and her were “on opposing sides” My
father was always trying to flex his age and authority over me,
and would threaten me physically if I challenged it, and even
tell me that “the Bible says that you should honor your mother

te” means to tame a wild animal. It

22.
tral forces for continuity here, and in my opinion was the birth-
place of a Pan-African politico-religious movement. African
spirituality gave them a social bond, social commitment.

It took me a while to even learn the little bit I know about
these things, and even longer to embrace them without being
afraid that it was evil stuff. While I grew up seeing people
“Shout” in church, nobody dared say it was an African thing.
Everyone either attributed it to just God moving through some-
‘one, or someone's emotions moving them toward God. They
never spoke of ancestors or the Motherland. But African spiri-
tual traditions was always at the root everything we did in the
church, whether we knew it or not. Mine was a Pentecostal
denomination founded way in the early 1900s. They believed
that speaking in tongues was a sign that God's spirit was in-
side of you. So, any time a praise break happened, someone
‘was speaking in tongues as their own personal prayer language
from God. The founder of the church had an anti-racist stance.
He didn’t like the fact that during that time, a lot of Christians
were segregationists. They believed that Black people should
live in separate conditions. It was ironic to him. Because in the
Bible, on the day of Pentecost, which is where the Pentecostal
denomination gets their name, the Spirit of God is recorded to
have fallen on people from all backgrounds and enabled them
to speak in all languages, not just one. My church founder be-
lieved that segregation was therefore against the Word.

And this was true for a lot of Black Pentecostals from
his generation. Black Pentecostal churches were some of the
earliest to integrate, especially at the Azusa Revival. The Azusa
Revival is what made Pentecostalism get global attention. For
whatever reason, all the news reporters were interested in this
racially-integrated, tongue-speaking religious experience. It
‘was to the point that many white Christians thought Pente-
costalism as a whole was actually sinful, because they were
so racist that they didn't wanna believe that God had given
his Spirit to people who were in communion with folks from

45
other races. What's more, one of the main critiques made of
the Azusa revival was that it was “voodoo? because the Black
folk who led the revival were singing spirituals and engaging
in practices that were derived from the Hush harbor. To this,
day, Pentecostalism itself is demonized by most Christian
denominations. The rituals and politics of Black Pentecostals,
was always seen as satanic.

When I first began to piece together the context and origin
of these rituals and political histories, I was in college, a time I
do not like remembering. That time was my earliest experience
being faced with outright white racial aggression, something
that was so alienating that I did not know what to do with my-
self. The only thing that made sense was getting into student ac-
tivism on my campus, to address the ways my peers and I were
being called slurs and being told that Black folk deserve police
brutality. I was so angry and upset, and my peers and I were
pushing a social media campaign in solidarity with the Move-
‘ment for Black Lives, and student activism across the country.
While Iwas posting about my experiences, my family members
and people from the church I grew up in started telling me that
what I was doing was not okay in the eyes of God. That [needed
to stop focusing on “the things of this world” and that activism
would distract me from my walk with Christ.

began feeling isolated from my religion. It was difficult to
reconcile my Christian beliefs with a social commitment when
everyone kept telling me this was at odds with the faith. And
then the ring shout came back into my life. I was on youtube,
and I saw a video of these women, dressed in white, shuffling in
acircle, clapping their hands, in a grassy backyard. There were
drums and piano. And they were singing this song “you've got
arright to the tree of life? Seeing these women awoke something
in me: I felt connected to them, and those words, that spiritual
song, and it reminded me that I had a right to resist, that my
church at home was wrong.

46
I started to parse the African spirituality and resistance at
the heart of the Black church history. I began to connect the
Shouts I grew up watching to this ring ceremony, to the Hush
harbor. I found a theological vocabulary to challenge what my
family’s church was saying, I started to dig into Black church
archives, and I even found that the founder of my family's
church used to have community programs, because of his anti-
racist stance. I tried to bring this information to my church,
connecting it to ring shout and hush harbor and slave rebel-
lion and the African rituals that prioritized individual auton-
omy and collective uplift.

My family and church would not hear me. They felt like
me telling them the Shout was African “took the glory away
from God.” And they felt like Black church involvement in ac-
tivism needed to be avoided because of the one thing Martin
Luther King learned: that if you get involved in a racial justice
struggle, you eventually have to confront capitalism which is
its economic basis. My church did not want to do that, because
in confronting capitalism and racism then you realize you have
to confront the institution of the nuclear family, cisheteropatri-
archy, and my family’s church was too transphobic and homo-
phobic and sexist to allow for that. The founder of our church
was so emphatic about cisheteropatriarchy that he broke away
from other Pentecostal denominations that allowed for women
preachers, because he saw that as ungodly.

At this point I knew I was at a crossroads. I could either
hold onto a faith that was so exclusionary in this way, or re-
turn to the source and struggle my way to freedom, But I was
afraid. It was like a stumbling block had been thrown before
me. I didn’t know what to do. That video had an impact on
me. Ring shout had woke up something in me, something that
felt ancient and expansive and powerful and more grounded
than anything else. I could not put it into words, but it was
not just frightening: it was illuminating. The narratives that
associated Africanness and rebellion with the devil were still

47
working through my nerves, though, still working through my
brain, still distracting me and making me believe white Man
lies, I found myself caught between a rock and a hard place, on
one hand trying to maintain favor with my family and church,
but on the other knowing that there was something bigger out,
there.

It took a while to feel brave enough to step out on new faith,
and the way I was able to begin unpacking the beliefs forced
onto me was by choosing to be brave enough to mimic those
women, See, my inner head saw myselfin them. Andas Iplayed
the video, I would shuffle my feet on the floor, in a circle, coun-
terclockwise, and close my eyes, and I started to think about
my enslaved ancestors, and thinking of them reminding them-
selves that they had a right to the tree of life helped me remind
myself of the same. And this is when an old buried memory,
something I had forgotten came back, and an old vision came
back to me, and I realized that when I was small, I used to do
this shuffle thing, this meditation thing, and I used to know
who I was when I was a kid before I got knocked out of align-
ment. And when that clicked, I started to change. It was still
a slow process. It took years. I had to do the ring shout again
and again; I tumed it into a regular thing. Whenever I had time
alone, [would do it. Sometimes I would schedule when: once at,
dawn, again at sunhigh, then evening, and finally at midnight
before bed,

During this time, I started to lear about the modern
prison abolition movement, and I started to learn about Black
nationalism, and the Black Panther Party, the civil rights
movement, the Black Liberation Army. I started to learn about
Assata Shakur, a modern maroon, who escaped being chained
in the US penal system after she was wrongfully framed for
the death of a cop, and is now alive in exile, overseas. The US
government classifies her a terrorist and still wants to recap-
ture her. I started to understand what Marxism was a little
more, how relations to natural resources were transformed by

43,
a mode of production that valued things in terms of unfettered
growth, accumulation, and exploitation rather than direct use
and production for needs of the people. This system warps
how we arrange ourselves and our labor in service of a market,
and is enabled by organized, protected robbery and theft of
resources by the colonizer.

I was becoming braver, less afraid, and so I started to
study revolutionary theory. I began to learn about how race
and gender was a nature-nurture question, not just nature
(genetics). The human species has more variation within so
called racial groupings than across those groupings, because
the traits used to create those categories are actually minute
and inconsequential to our biophysical makeup; furthermore,
regarding sex characteristics, there are about four other known,
combinations beyond the two classified as male/female, such
diversity being about as common as there are redheads, and
many people aren't aware that there is variation even within
so-called sexes. The flattening of both these truths, however,
to fit our differences into a hierarchy and value system, served
a political function on behalf of the Man. And they were
inherently intertwined: the scientists who pioneered modern
biological sciences were the same ones who created racism and
a central facet of how they “proved” Africans were inhuman
was through classifications of anatomical differences marked
as “sex:

I started to learn that what was called “Crime” was really
just a code word for anything that oppressed people did to
fight a system of haves and have nots, or to survive that sys-
tem, and so prisons/police and the courts were tools of oppres-
sion. Some of the main people impacted by this were queer
trans folk just tryna live, because if you're constantly being
segregated against and pushed out of homes, healthcare access,
houses of worship, it’s harder to get or keep jobs, and you're
more likely to turn to certain underground activities to make
it through, including actual resistance. This put them on the

49
front lines of the struggle against modem slavery. These were
new ideas that I had heard about and somewhat considered
growing up, but I never got the opportunity to really study or
examine very deeply until that time period. All the while, I was
beginning to slowly but surely unpack a lot of the things I was
taught to hold onto while I was locking myself in the prayer
Closet. And this meant learning to love the ancestors, to cher-
ish them, to lean on what they have to teach us, and to love
myself,

My first big act of self-love and ancestral remembrance was
saying a big “fuck you” to gender norms. I remember that my
older brother would try to argue with me about this: “the Bible
says God created male and female I was told, which meant
‘man was the head and woman created for him, So anything vi-
olating that was against nature, but more importantly it was a
threat to the species being able to propagate and get its needs in
the environment. How can one be “fruitful and multiply” oth-
erwise right? My brother would emphasize that “there has to
be a distinction.” In his mind, and in the mind of many others,
the only way to manage the affairs of a culture, nation, soci-
ety, is in accordance to what biology supposedly says we can
do. Biology supposedly says that a person's gonad and other
sex characteristics equal such and such thing and so that is the
way they must behave. I was learning that these ideas came
from a “survival of the fittest” narrative, to justify transpho-
bia and homophobia. I started to lean, however, that life was
more than just about biological imperatives: and that the capi-
talist and the colonizer only told us it was because they need to
arrange our people in particular ways in order to divide us and
exploit our labor, keep us suppressed, and continue to profit
from our domination and the destruction of the planet. Rigid
gender norms maintain this process.

In African cultures, I then learned, especially those that
were communalistic, there was a lot more freedom in terms
of gender and sexuality, because the material mode of pro-

50
duction, provisioning, and environmental inhabitation did
not allow for certain forms of oppression. Therefore, when
Europeans encountered African people, they saw whole
persons, who had gifts and talents. We were medicine people,
artisans, divers, farmers, storytellers, warriors, childrearers,
craftspeople, builders, musicians, and more. We were and are
a people who hold the skills that are necessary to build a
healthy society, because we passed those skills down from
generation to generation, and we invent new ones and update
them as time has gone on since the beginning of our existence.
We are the origin of humanity, and we had entire societies and
cultures and often times, the ones holding onto our traditions,
the ones taking leadership as shamans or serving in the royal
court, or pioneering as warriors, were queer and trans. These
were the skills and labor we often passed down, the roles we
occupied, There were multiple ways to arrange ourselves.
Granted, the labels “queer” and “trans” were not used by the
ancestors to describe people like us. There was no need for such
terminology because the marginalization and demonization of
those who today would be called queer or trans is not univer-
sal across the Motherland. Africa was very diverse in ancient
times, and is still very diverse to this very day. But our ances-
tors used gender norms to arrange their societies and divide
labor in a very different way. They knew that a class of beings
could meet its needs in the environment in various ways. When
‘we were given status as priests or in the royal court, it was be-
cause of a recognition of the many roles that can be played to
help our societies survive and evolve. And it wasn't based off
a concern with biology alone, but rather with spirit. Myth and
culture were central in the socio-ecological processes by which
Africans would arrange labor, assign value, and establish a net
work of relations that allowed us to inhabit our environments
in certain ways. Life in those times was far from perfect, but the
systems developed were far less hierarchical and exploitative.

51
Flash forward all these centuries later, and Black trans peo-
ple are saying that our labor and our role in society does not,
have to be limited anymore. This is what I began to understand.
‘We can do more than what the master/bourgeoisie says and we
don’t have to only be what our ancestors did in the past: we
each can define what it means to be the descendants of our an-
cestors for today and the future. We can choose to determine
our genders, and thus establish on our OWN terms what role
in the community we will play, for each individual, According
to our personal autonomy, and the needs of the collective. This
isa communistic and anarchistic vision, aimed at developing a
society maintained by all, from each person's capacity, unhin-
dered by a caste or class or even a party or any demiurge or
patriarch, and that is invested in the life of the planet.

T began to appreciate the value of this revolutionary and
ecogenic perspective on the right to my gender liberation, be-
cause it exposed the question of labor and power and resources
and how they get divided. Without this outlook, it would have
been impossible for me to understand why transphobia and
queerphobia were so hard to exorcise from our people. Even
those who would acknowledge that it was connected to Euro-
pean religion would still uphold its institutions. It’s because
while it could be traced to the myth of the Hamite, the sexu-
ally predatory heathen, the animalistic, savage, crazy, inferior,
Black African, it had more than just a religio-cultural function:
it was developed to serve a society and material interest that
too many of our people, unfortunately want to reap the bene-
fits of.

Europeans, or Black people who want to reclaim colonial
capitalist hierarchies and labor divisions and material power
for themselves, would throw gender/sexually variant Africans
in particular under the bus, to make us a scapegoat that repre-
sented all that was wrong about the “Hamite” Our queerness
and transness was always used as evidence for why Africans
as a whole are supposedly inhuman and deserving of slavery.

52
And they did this intentionally because if they could destroy
us, they could make everyone avoid the cultural touchstones
that were vital to our unity and self-understanding, to further
weaken our nations. So once they get rid of those holding onto
the mythic forces that Africans used to define ourselves, by call-
ing our spiritual leadership satanic, they introduce their narra-
tives, to get people to align their consciousness with whatever
myths the Man wanted to impose, so we could unite with their
material interests over our own. This helps them get over on
our backs.

In this context, some of us began to look down on ourselves,
to see white people's rigid standards as a more “civilized” up-
date to African standards, We ran after the master’s values in
place of ours, hoping to secure some degree of power for our-
selves, We would hide or deny the existence of gender/sexual
variance, or of traditional spirituality in our lives, to help ev-
eryone look more civilized and holy, and rise above our “jun-
gle status” We became obedient and subservient, bending our
knees under their authority, and gave our bodies and labor over
because we were forced. We went into hiding. And the secrecy
turned into forgetting about our own lifeways, and eventually
the forgetting turned into denial, and then the denial turned
into what happens now where folk pattern the white Man's re-
ligion by calling our faiths “demonic” and when that fails they
use the white Man's science by saying that “transness is unnat-
ural!”

When I began to understand these things, I began to real-
ize that to be “trans” (a prefix which literally means “away") is
always about moving “away” from that which was hierarchi-
cally imposed on me at birth. This is why when I first came out
I said that my gender was “marronage,” evoking the runaway
slaves. Iwas tryna define my life in the “wilderness” beyond or
away from the reaches of slavery and its afterlives. Iwas seeing
my transness as a struggle against the racial capitalism that im-
posed cisgender institutions onto my body. Importantly, I was

53
trying to emphasise that I was not just escaping something but
creating something new in the “wilderness” of gender strug-
gle. [earned from Saidiya Hartman that the maroons and run-
aways and outliers were defined as much by what they were
running fromas by what they were running toward (her words,
not mine):

“[S]afe at last, we have come together, here where
no one can reach us anymore, the village of free
people, here we speak of peace, a place of abun-
dance, haven.”

It-was essential for us to update our myths now. Now they
would need to be used to neurochemically reinforce these re-
bellious and proto-revolutionary activities. This is when I redis-
covered the stories about people who could fly. Through these
narratives our ancestors would symbolically uphold the spiri-
tual and ethical validity of maroon acts

It is said the people who could fly had other powers, too:
levitating objects, teleportation, starting fires with their mind,
disappearing into objects. This was, again, a “psychological
trick” (to use Toni Morrison's words): translation, whatever
they needed to do to get free and meet their needs, they did it.
‘They were not bound by what the Man had to say was possible
in this reality because they work its roots, grasp its roots, and
transform that reality in pursuit of life for themselves. So I
began to say to myself that my gender is marronage, getting
lost in the wild, and marronage is both about running away
from something and establishing a new form of African life
simultaneously, and people can fly stories tell me that there
is no limits to how I get this done, if I grasp and work from
the roots of what is oppressing us (ie, T must get free by any
‘means necessary).

Thold onto these insights and beliefs and stories and rituals
now, as a form of remembrance of God and connection to my

54
people and our ancestors and the Black Radical Traditions they
passed down. This is how I immerse myself into a certain con-
sciousness or conscience, a revolutionary commitment. It has
cost me relationships to the people I grew up loving at home
and in church. It has brought me ridicule and other challenges
that I grew up trying to avoid through conformity. But it has
also meant that I was able to discover what it means to be a star
queen. Even though I got spat on and things hurled at me and
attacked and lied on and disrespected, the rewards of learning
how not to bend your knee to the master, how not to transgress
against yourself and how to maintain respect for who you are
and where you came from, and how not to transgress against
your people and to move in solidarity with all of us in our lib-
eration ~ this has outweighed everything else.

“Run, Mary, Run
(Oh, Lord)

Run, Martha, Run
(Oh, Lord)

Tell, Mary, Run
say, you gota right
to the tree of life
Run, Mary, Run

(Oh, Lord)

Run, Martha, Run
(Oh, Lord)

Tell, Mary, Run
say, you got a right
to the tree of life”

9. Kala (Sunday 27th June)
I tried to tell my mother, but she ain’t understand: she had
raised a sojourner in a strange land. Liffe was like quicksand

and I was up to my waist, charging through the fray. I would

55
walk at night under the glare of the lights, wishing for the day
Td lose my life. By this point I was standing in who I was, and
the world was beating back at me, I had to drop out of school
after being attacked.

My back was always on fire and my legs were giving out.
I couldn't sleep, my skin was always itchy. My mind was
racing, throat was sore, body was shaking. Palpitations. There
were knives wearing me down. I got so thin. I felt like pencil
shavings sitting at the bottom of a dustbin. I tried to find love.
Find something that gave me purpose. My partner at the time
showed me a sweetness I will always remember. And I was
working for a bit, and could save, and I was able to pay off
a few things and it was an enjoyable time. But I was unwell.
And the doctors weren't listening to me as I tried to tell them
I was falling apart, And my parents weren't listening to me
as I begged and pleaded with them to let me stay with them,
so I could find rest for my weary bones. And the church kept
offering to pray for me and my healing, but really they were
praying that I'd return to the lies I was taught. And kept subtly
implying that it was my fault why I was now beset with so
many physical, mental, emotional, and financi

In the 1970s, there was a Black revolutionary by the name
of George Jackson who wrote a revolutionary set of letters and
theorized the grounding for a lot of modern prison revolution-
ary organizing. He was assassinated by the prison State, after
having first been jailed on false accusations. To honor him, his
brother Jonathan Jackson, and others who struggled as he did,
incarcerated brethren in the California prisons began to fast, to
train for warfare, to fight, and to study Black radical tradition
during the month of August.

Over the years, the Black August tradition has come to
honor the many deaths and births of Black revolutionary
ancestors and political formations, from across the Diaspora,
which all fortuitously converge in this month, They say the
Underground Railroad was founded on August 2nd, The Fergu-

crises,

56
son Uprising after the death of Mike Brown in 2014 happened
during August. The designation of a red, black, green flag for
all Black people by the Universal Negro Improvement Associ-
ation (an organization founded by Marcus Garvey) happened
on August 13th, 1920. The revolutionary and political prisoner
Mumia Abu Jamal once put it this way:

“August is a month of meaning, of repression and
radical resistance, of injustice and divine justice,
of righteous rebellion, of individual and collective
efforts to free the slaves and break the chains that
bind us”

‘The amount of historical coincidences during August for
the history of Black resistance is so vast I cannot even list all,
the important dates here. I found out about it only in 2018, so
T'm not an expert. I'm still learning, What is always interesting
to me is that the day Ifirst came out as gender variant, that first
time I wore flowers, and I told people “my gender is marronage”
was in August. I remember it. August 14th. That's the same
day as the Bwa Kayiman ceremony. This was the ritual that
launched the Haitian Revolution.

I began to call this day my “fugiversary? or “fugitive an-
niversary’ to highlight that connection between Black rebel-
lion and my journey toward gender self-definition. I began to
look at my “coming out” as a new birth into a sacred or holy
season. I partook in the Black August fast the first that month,
and would try my best to exercise in a way that wasn’t too
much on my disabled body, and to study more, so much more.
Talso would meditate, pray, ring shout at sunrise, sunhigh, sun-
set, midnight. I then learned that that year a prison strike was
gonna happen too, a big one, one of the biggest prison strikes
in the history of the United States. The organizers of the strike
‘wanted to hold it in honor of the Attica Uprising.

I started telling anyone I could about Black August, about
the Prison Strike, and about Black revolutionary struggle in

57
general. It wasn’t like proselytizing though. It was more so
like I was sharing a people's history with others. Like I was
a modern djeli, a griot, the ancient culture bearers and oral
historians of ancient Mali. I was on fire. There was a revolu-
tionary history I could see myself and my transness in now,
more clearly than ever before, and my fugiversary coincided
with some of the most important dates in that history. I was
beginning to take underground methods, dialectics, critical the-
ory more seriously. I remember diving into an analysis of hu-
manism with my comrades at this time. I started to explore my
family’s genealogy records too. Black August fasting was caus-
ing my consciousness to expand in newer directions. This was
when I started to explicitly identify as “gender nonconform-
ing” Before then I hadn't used any of the labels pioneered in
the LGBTQIA+ movement. But now Ihad a confidence and a
frame of reference within which I could locate that terminol-
ogy on my own terms.

‘The contradictions between me and my parents or between
me and my doctors or me and my church began to get heav-
ier. The more radical I became, the less willing to conform to
my assigned gender I became: and my parents weren't having
that, the strictures in the medical industrial complex could not
fathom that, and my church wasn’t tolerating that. Coming out
of Black August of that year, going into the fall, eventually my
battles forced me out the home, and I stopped going to the doc-
tors, and I stopped going to church eventually too.

‘Some comrades came through. One of them I knew through,
my comrade Gil Balagoon (not their real name, but this cat will
know why I call them that). My other comrade, I call him Jimi
Love (also not his real name but he will know why I call him,
that) also held me down,

The love they showed me, that comrade love, it’s a differ-
ent type of love. It’s not like friendship or family or something
sexual and romantic (although it's possible for people to have
comrades who are family, friends, or sexually/romantically in-

58
timate). I can't explain the love in words, but when I think
about it, remember this dream I once had. A dream where a
bunch of us are dancing in the dream, creating something oth-
erworldy but so grounded and needed. And there's this music
playing behind us to set that atmosphere and those intentions.
It’s this set of piano chords, and it’s the kind of sound that feels
at once elegiac and at once blissful, at once melancholy and at
‘once grateful as hell. That's my picture of a comrade’s love: a
dream and a song.

I met my older sister around then too. She also showed up
for me. She started to teach me what it meant to be queer and
on your own, Surviving and hustling, we did that. It was a
rough time. Out where we was at, Ifaced more outright gender
violence than Thad ever before. Rocks thrown at me, people ha-
rassing me even while standing in a crowd in front of the police
with no fear at all, men following me on bikes at night, Twas a
lot more feminine in my appearance then too, and a lot more
comfortable with myself and so that meant people wanted to
fuck with me. My sister tried to teach me how to keep my head
up, to grind, to watch the streets as a gender nonconforming
person, to move tact.

‘The more dangerous the outdoors got for me, the more mil-
itant it made me. This was 2019 now. A lot more trans people,
especially Black ones, were being attacked and killed that year,
I learned. By June, we found out that Layleen Polanco Xtrav-
aganza had been taken from us at Rikers Island, I remember
being ata rally in her honor. I was so angry and fed up by then
with seeing Black trans folks, specifically Black trans women
murdered. I remember going off on the reporters who were at
the rally. Why were journalists showing up after Layleen died?
Where was the media before that? I was in such a rage. Twent
off and I remember some people got shaken up by it and asked
‘me to lead a march so folks could protest and express their frus-
tration, I went for it. Iwas fired up. We did march, Some of the
folks marching had not wanted to march though, particularly

59
a few of the trans gorls who knew Layleen and so they called
‘me out for it. I had tried to get everyone's input on whether a
march was feasible, but the gorls there let me know I needed to
center them because of their safety concerns. Everyone at the
march, for example, kept saying “we have nothing to lose but
our chains.” echoing Assata Shakur, but all the trans women
kept yelling “and our lives! We have nothing to lose but our
chains and our lives” That shook me up. One of my old peers
and comrades was right by my side, We ended up co-founding
a defense formation together. The “street queer anarkata de-
fenders” SQUAD. We chose an acronym like that so it could
blend in with Black lingo. It was focused specifically on the
safety needs of Black trans women and transfeminine people.
That was the vision.

“SQUAD is Street. As in hood, ratchet, ghetto.
There's no respectability over here. We fighting
for freedom by any means necessary, And we
don't need nobody's institutions or authority to
get it.

SQUAD is Queer. As in not cis/het. The straights
and cis gays and their politics stay away! We queer
as in we don’t jack transmisogynoir, we don't jack
colonial values, and we don't jack boujie values,
dont jack cisheteropatriarchy, disablism, human-
centrism—none of it

SQUAD is Anarkata. As in, Black/anarchic/radical
‘This about African-centered anarchy. We fierce,
we maroon, we wayward, we crazy, we savage, we
ungoverned, we undomesticated, we uncivilized,
we wild—all the Things that threaten Man,
SQUAD is a Defense network. This is a fight for
communal and personal safety, by us, for us

60
Defenders are committed revolutionaries fighting
against all domination”

Black August of that year was focused on SQuAD shit, for
me. I was fasting, studying, training, trying to figure out how
to establish a revolutionary network that would actually cen-
ter the defense of Black trans women and transfeminine peo-
ple. I was pulling together comrades from across the gender
spectrum to struggle and build with them on this “Anarkata”
wavelength that SQUAD was tryna build from on the ground.
Anarchist niggas against racial kapitalist ableist transmisogy-
noirist authority. That was how one comrade put it, to tie it all
together, and tie to Black trans women’s liberation. I was talk-
ing with cats from throughout the world, Black Autonomous
Radicals from North, South, Midwest, overseas. My uncle let
me come stay with him during this time, so I had a measure of
stability and that animated me to put in work for this SQUAD
shit, I started to make my Black August focused on trans liber~
ation history. This is when I found out that Marsha P Johnson
was born during Black August. August 24th, One of the many
holy coincidences during this sacred month.

Marsha P Johnson was one of my biggest inspirations. She
was a revolutionary Black trans woman who co-founded the
first trans woman of color, sex worker led labor organization
in United States history, the Street Trans Action Revolution-
aries. She was badass. She said “we believe in picking up the
gun” She was fierce and fine, always looking gorgeous. She
once said “Star people are beautiful people” She was also a
performer and a poet. One of her most famous works was a
spoken word piece called “Soul.” Marsha struggled with men-
tal issues, and even admitted to Sylvia Rivera once that she
had focus/attention issues (she may have been neurodivergent).
Marsha was also religious. She talked about how she had mar~
ried Jesus because “he never laughed at me” Her and the STAR
girls also practiced a Catholicized form of African spirituality,

61
which they would use to protect themselves as they organized
and hustled the streets. They struggled to hold down free hous-
ing for homeless trans youth and to raise funds to get trans folk
out of the prison system. They had three chapters in the United
States and one overseas.

Learning to honor Marsha during Black August really be-
came like the last piece in a puzzle I was slowly putting to-
gether about who Iam, about my destiny, about who I am sup-
posed to be and what I am here to do. I began to identify as
“nonbinary” during this time period, because I realized that it

was more than just not conforming to gender for me, [had an
affinity to Marsha P Johnson, especially because in a lot of the
pictures I saw of her, she was wearing flowers like I did. And
she was dark skinned too, Yet, I felt like I was alittle too Brick
to actually claim trans womanhood without being seen as an
outsider or a liar. I tried to make sure SQUAD was modeled
on what Marsha did through STAR, though. Supporting street,
houseless folk, the prison struggle, class struggle, having a firm
anti-imperial and anti-colonial outlook, a critique of the med-
ical industrial complex and military industrial complex, and a
spiritual as well as artistic center. We would host “Kritical Kick-
backs” that were like a mix of an open mic night with a political
education session. And when we were out, we'd pour a liba-
tion and do ring shout, to get that ancestral communion going.
With my comrades we pioneered the “liberation ritual” which
is like an Afrofuturist performance that mixes hip hop, soul,
storytelling, theatre with revolutionary theory and conscious-
ness raising, Liberation ritual is basically a secular ceremony
(hence the name) and is supposed to call forth a sense of el-
evation or uplift in your body, while inspiring revolutionary
consciousness. I was remembering that Marsha had said that
nothing mattered if you ain’t had Soul. Liberation ritual was
about Soul,

62
Coming out of Black August and going into the fall, things
began to get tiresome for me. Iwas working again but not mak-
ing nearly enough to survive or save. Iwas taking on mad jobs.
Organizing around trans self defense and mutual aid was burn-
ing me out. And I had trauma I was burying. The trauma from
being harassed was catching up to me, but also the trauma from
being kicked out of home, and the traumas from the past, from
my childhood, things that I buried and forgot and told myself
Thad gotten over....it was all coming back, Plus my health: the
back pains, the insomnia, the itching. It all had gotten worse
and I never once went back to the doctor about it.

But I kept acting like I was strong, like I had it together,
like Twas okay, and just focusing on Anarkata shit, on trying
to help everyone else, especially other trans women and trans-
feminine folk, By the winter, one of my comrades envisioned
a temporary community center that we Anarkatas could host,
that was like an Afrofuturist immersion into our politics, and
wwe started putting in the work to get that built. It took a few
months of fundraising, telling folk about it, and getting shit
set up so we could have food, games, music, and to make sure
it'd be accessible. We brought kids with us when we finally put,
it together; we had self defense equipment and contraceptives
and zines and books and a free store for folk as well. SQUAD
held some liberation rituals, and workshops on mental health
with one of the other SQuADsibs. There was a film screening,
Pumzi by Wanuri Kahiu, and we used to open up discussions
about Black radical ecology. It was so beautiful. So enriching.
We had so many Black trans people show up, and so many
of them felt so honored and safe. It was actually pretty game
changing, The Left has historically failed the community, but
‘we Anarkatas was changing that, And yet I was still stressing
out at the event. I wasn’t satisfied; I was anxious. I remember
Jimi Love had to tell me to basically calm the fuck down. I en-
joyed myself but I was also really freaking out. Mostly I was
worried about one thing: safety. Safety for the gorls, safety for

63
the kids, Was everyone safe? But behind all of that, it was really
pain and traumas that I had buried, it was bubbling up again.

‘Then the pandemic hit. A virus that changed the world. Ev-
eryone thought the Anarkatas was gonna host another round
of events but we all got forced indoors. A “quarantine” Nobody
had predicted that was coming. Shit got terrifying. The streets
of New York emptied out in a way I had only seen in apoca-
lyptic zombie films. I remember one of my best friends called
me crying because they were out of the city and worried by
what they saw. I have no words for how chilling that season
was for me. It was like ice filled my bones. And I was already
not feeling great, and that coronavirus shit honestly just made
it worse, People were panic buying items from stores, throw-
ing themselves into weird conspiracies, preparing for the end
of the world,

And killing Black trans women. The death rates for the gorls
skyrocketed during the pandemic. If I'm not mistaken, 2020
was the worst year in modern history for Black trans lives
in the United States. Majority of those slain was Black trans
women, What did that tell me? I needed to do more with this
SQUAD shit. That was my immediate response. I was tryna act
like a hero; but really it was my traumas that I kept burying
that animated me.

Me and my comrades went so hard with the online political
education, coordination of mutual aid, tryna get masks and san-
itizer and funds and food moved around. Working hard to try
to make sure people could get by during a time when nobody
could really get by. Jobs was disappearing and everyone was
becoming homeless. And then Ahmaud Arbery, and George
Floyd, and Breonna Taylor died. And that’s when Black people
had enough. I heard the word of the streets. Black folk went
to the parts of the cities that had all the capital and nice stores
and they turnt the fuck up. Started burning shit down, Riot-
ing, Looting. They attacked police stations, cut the wires, burnt

of
them down, They threw shit at cops, set cop cars on fire. Pris-
oners rebelled and set things ablaze.

This wasn’t just in the United States either. In places like
Nigeria, folks were realizing that their government had locked
away supplies that was supposed to be used for covid relief, so
they looted. Many young queer folk in Nigeria were going up
against their police, who kept targeting them. In Brazil, there
were prison breaks, and protests against their fascist president,
and Black people were rising up there. Black people had been
rioting and protesting since before the pandemic, in places like
Sudan, Haiti, and elsewhere, but in 2020 it was like global Black
resistance just swelled and interwove. A Third Great Upheaval.
In the United States, it scared the shit out of white people. They
seemed to think for sure that every Black person was ready to
slit their throats.

It didn’t help that everyone had to wear masks too: now you
couldn’t see nobody face. I remember walking down the block
with my cousins, and if we were in white neighborhoods, the
white folk would look at us all skittish, as if they thought we
‘was about to avenge our ancestors by attacking them. This was
what the rebellions of 2020 had white people thinking. And so
they started tryna show fake love to Black people. Going to our
protests, and putting out little “we support Black Lives Matter
(now)" statements on every business and website and college.
None of them wanted to catch the heat so they had to act like
they was on our good side, And if they didn’t do that, then
they just got violent in response. Vigilantes were driving cars
into the protesters. And the cops were doing their best to do
a slew of revenge killings. They used military grade weapons
to suppress our people. Still, it didn’t stop our people. Black
people fought back so hard that many cops actually quit their
jobs, because their morale got so low. They were fighting an
enemy they couldn't defeat

White civilians began to act like the world was gonna end,
when really it was that Black people were rebelling against

65
their world, Rebelling because now it was like after all we been
through, here we are collectively suffering from a virus, and
nobody is outside due to that, and mad people are dying, and
becoming homeless and poor, and yall still find a way to kill us?
Fuck that, As one woman said in a video. “We did it yall way.
Now burn it down.” That was the word on the street. But the
gorls were still being killed. Black people were turning up on
the Man, but still kept finding a way to punch down and mur-
der Black trans women. It became unsafe for Black trans peo-
ple to go to protests with our own people, because our straight
counterparts would deadass turn around from rebelling just to
attack us. I remember being on the train after being at a march
(a peaceful demonstration, by the way) and this straight man
looked at me and my SQuADsib and was just like “see the rea-
son why God is using the cops to kill us is because of that com-
munity.” It was one of those “this generation is calling wrong
right and calling right wrong, and God is not pleased, and so
judgement is here” Attacks on the community from our own
people deadass skyrocketed as the contradiction between Man
and the so-called Negro got hotter and hotter in the summer of
2020.

And, make no mistake, white people was doing it too: they
literally started saying in the media “transgender Black Marx-
ists are trying to destroy the United States” They literally put us
at the center of the rebellion. As this continued to happen, the
harder things got in the work I was doing with my comrades.
I remember being at a protest and I was the one that a cop and
some local politician got violent with, not my comrades. Me,
the transfeminine one.

During this time, that was the label I started going toward.
Black August came along again, and I was starting to wear
dresses now. For the first time ever. I had never considered do-
ing, but had had a dream, In the dream I was transfeminine. I
felt it was time to explore that in reality. My first dress was this
beautiful black colored joint that had green, yellow, red, blue,

66
orange jewels all over it. It was the exact color of my vision
from all those years ago, the one I saw when I first pondered
the Divine, My gender was cosmic effluvia that day. I was a star
queen. The second dress I wore was this white skirt, and I put
on a pair of wings, and I wore a fringe necklace over my face,
and I started to tell people I was one of the people who could
fly. A femme queen, warrior queen. It was scary to claim that
for myself though. I had kinda always had a feeling, and truth
be told, some of the trans women I had organized with would
always clock it for me, but I was deeply terrified to speak that
out loud. Transfem? In a world that is so dangerous for us?
And indeed, that Black August, I experienced so much
street harassment it was wild. Even at protests and actions
and events me and my comrades were doing, random folks
on the street felt entitled to come near me, to touch me, to
express sexual interest, to stare at me, And while I had been
through all of these things before, the regularity with which
it happened and the fact that it was because of only one
reason: my trans womanhood... that shook me up bad. But
I continued to act like I was okay. Like I was strong. I could
handle anything, Iwas the Brick Cunt, the bitch they threw at
Stonewall at the cops. I was bold. The wild thing Man cannot
house. I remember when I would say to other gorls “I cant feel
fear’ It wasn't that I couldn't feel it, I just didn’t let myself feel
it. [kept saying to myself “don’t panic, organize” Fight. Fight.
Fight. “Are you okay?” People would ask me. “You're scaring
me” I told them I was okay. I wasn’t. But I thought I had to
say that I was. To be that trans heroine that I didn't have...
And that's what it was. All my heroines were dead. Some
part of me thought I was supposed to be too. That all it was
‘was to live as a beacon of subversion and then disappear into
the grave, Cuz aint that how it was for Marsha? She's only
remembered for her resistance, not her humanity, right? Isn't
that what we deserve? Because we are descendants from the
priests and shamans and witch doctors of ancient Africa!

or
Right? What about Mary Jones? New York City. During slav-
ery. One of the earliest Black trans women in the US record.
Caught stealing to survive. They called her the “man monster.”
Aint that all we are? We show up in the record only as rebels,
only when we demonized, and then we forgotten right? Right?
Same with Frances Thompson. Memphis, Tennessee. Just after
slavery. How do we hear about her? Resistance, right! She's
testifying at the federal level about the white ra
visited upon her and her community. They also misgendered

‘ist terror

her, using her transness to delegitimize the truth of her story!
And then she fades from memory. That's the only way we
know her: a rebel, and then she dies!

Who else? Other trans and gender variant women, queens,
mothers: Zaz Nova, who was also at Stonewall with Marsha
P. Or the gorls at the Compton Cafeteria Riots, which happens
before Stonewall and was an early example of Black trans
rebellion. Known only for heroics, and also forgotten. William
Dorsey Swann, one of the first recorded drag queens in US
history. Also resisted the cops. Also known for heroies; also
forgotten. Crystal Labeija, who pioneered modern House
ballroom culture because why? Protest. She was upset at the
racism and colorism in the usual drag balls. So, she imple-
mented a new institution for our community. Then she dies of
health complications and so many people don't know about,
her or her contributions unless you've been in Ballroom. Even,
as ballroom hits mainstream attention, The gorls are here,
we fight, we are forgotten, and then the only thing we are
remembered for is our resistance. So why live for anything
else then? Why live for shit when the only thing that will
matter when you are gone is what you did to save everyone
else right? Right? So fuck self care! Fuck acknowledging that I
wasn’t okay, that I was unwell, that I needed help, that I was
scared. Fuck my traumas and shit. Fuck that, right? Because
itd be forgotten!

68
In the Bible, Jesus once spoke about a sign of the end times,
when the Buzzard would come. Many early Christians inter-
preted this symbol as representing God's messengers. In the
South, during slavery, when African people died in the field,
and were left to out to be eaten by Buzzards, some enslaved
folk developed a ritual called the Buzzard Lope, where they
connected the Buzzard to Jesus, and would mimic the move-
ments of the Buzzard, in honor to honor those who had died.
In the Yoruba religion, there is a story about how the Buzzard
‘went up to heaven to intercede on behalf of humanity, and re-
store the earth from a crisis. This Buzzard was a manifestation
of Oshun, the orisha of waters, of fertility, of femininity, and an
orisha who they say is the guardian of queer, trans, gay people.

T mention these things because coming out of Black August
during the fall of 2020, as [was falling apart, and my godmother,
a daughter of Oshun, came to me, and let me know that I wasn't
okay. That I needed to take a break. And that it was okay to do
so. And in that time period, she asked me to be her daughter.
She asked to take me under her wing. To let her teach me how
to navigate these apocalyptic times and nurture myself. To let,
her teach me how to properly honor those gworls who had
died, And to let her teach me how to connect with the Divine
and ride for my people in a real way. She taught me that being
real is about taking the bad and the good in life, and finding
it worthwhile to actually try to live in this world with them
both. And not just live with both, but create something from
that complicated life. Actively. For myself. Not anyone else. For
‘me. To not lose sight of the personal stake I had in everything
Iwas trying to do, but to both honor it and actively center it.
Because that's the only way to be conscious of the inner needs
that everything else is acting on behalf of,

So I became Bl3ssing Oshun Ra. I became BI3ssing Oshun
Ra, so I could learn how to create a legacy that was more than
just how I would be remembered once I died. [became BI3ssing
Oshun Ra because I needed a living heroine to learn from. Re-

Co)
member when I said that in African traditions, it was the el-
ders that helped one with aligning their inner head with my
destiny? The elders are important not simply because of age
or even experience but because of the wisdom they should
carry and pass down. Divine power is acknowledged within
all things, but it is apportioned like a web with certain meet-
ing points at the nexus of consciousness. Ritual serves to fa-
cilitate meditation on that fact, an alignment that has ethical
implications. And the point of this mysticism was to help with
reaching one’s highest self, their fullest potential,

Now, with my godmother's input I could learn how to cre-
ate a legacy that was truly meaningful, because I had a living
legacy to learn from and apply to my own struggle. This was
the missing piece I needed. I could learn how to fly better now,
and to walk like a Buzzard, to honor our community, and to
connect with the sacred and advocate for my people, because
Thave someone to guide me, Without a living legacy, one is
without a struggle to carry out.

Ineeded an intergenerational connection to understand my
trans womanhood in a more humane fashion. At the core of
what she taught me was something the Combahee River Collec-
tive once said all Black women must learn: to be levelly human
is enough. My godmother taught me what it meant to begin
rejecting queendom and pedestals. Yes, we can understand our
spiritual and political history, to be the ones who can fly, but
we are also human. We fly and we resist and we grasp roots,
and we invoke spirit and build society and pursue our needs in
the environment and all these other things that are true of our
people for no other reason than that we are humans respond-
ing to varied conditions, good and bad, large and small, and
trying to make the best life of them to meet our needs, That
levelly humanness is important to how I am beginning to align
my inner head now. That levelly humanness is how we become
cognizant of our needs, personal and collective, large or small,
and act on them,

70
My godmother teaches me what it means to touch the
stars, She helps me better understand what gender self-
determination looks like at the personal level. It's not just
about a transition or who we love, although it can include
those things. It's also about how we form community bonds.
It's about rejecting the hierarchies our parents taught us and
creating motherhood based off respect. It's about fighting to
occupy land and defending ourselves from the pigs and the
Man, like my godmother did at the Christopher Street Piers
It's about not being told by the master how we use our bodies
or our labor. So it’s about not being confined to the plantation.
It's about choosing to build ourselves and our people up in our
‘own way, and not just in a way society says our bodies are
“supposed” to, It's about defending ourselves, our community.
But it's also about personal dignity. A personal definition
of things. She helps me examine my individual place in this
journey, as well as the collective vision of things. I talk with
her, laugh with her, listen to her, and then I reflect on my
inner relationship to this struggle. What does my heart tell
me? How do I feel? She is always asking us that, And that
becomes a question of who do I model my femininity and my
womanhood after? After my birth mother, who I'm so similar
to, who is like me in so many ways, but who also had to
harden herself in the face of a fucked up world. And where did
she learn her womanhood from? Her own birth mother, who
‘was hardened in the jungle of misogynoir too. Is it healthy for
me to pattern it? To live in self-neglect? If not, what would
best help me feel whole? And treat others as whole persons
too? Because maybe my birth mother struggles to accept me
because she hasn't gotten the chance to be levelly human
either!

‘These kinds of questions I started asking myself because of
my godmother’s guidance. And it helped me soften up. I had
begun to see myself as just a ferocious ass bitch. I would say
that I was a rough bitch, tough bitch, a thug, a soldier. That I

n
‘was just a descendant of the warrior queens and shamans from
Africa, and nothing further. And my mother would celebrate
these things, but she would also ask me to be more fluid, like
water, and to shapeshift, like those who turned into Buzzards,
and to ask myself about what other ways of being human are
available to me in this journey. Including softer ways. Ways
that were less militant. Newer ways to escape the chains forced
onto my mind and my body. Ways that might even be apolitical.
‘Tobe levelly human is enough. If the people who could fly used
their powers to get free by any means, that also has to include
normalcy, the mundane too. I'm trying to understand how the
destiny my inner head points toward is a full experience in this
‘world, that includes but isn't limited to the spiritual or political.

For example, I learned that it was okay to cry because of
my trans godmother, This was part of learning to fly, to nurture
myself, to walk like a Buzzard, to honor the slain, to connect
to the divine and ride for my people. Part of this is to actually
let tears fall, to start bawling, and just let it out. Gorls like me
don't do it because people will take advantage of your tears.
So Thated crying. But I also needed to learn how to open up to
my fullest, human experience, and embracing its possibilities,
even despite the hardness and bitterness of this world.

So, earned to embrace softness. learned to embrace love.
‘This was something else I struggled with. I hated the feeling
of caring for someone in an intimate fashion. Even sitting and
watching a movie with family members was too much for me,
was scary even. I did not like to let people get close to me be-
cause I was so accustomed to just moving on from things, hav-
ing to be ready for the next crisis or change in my life. But my
godmother taught me to fly by opening to my fullest, human
experience, and embrace its possibilities, even despite the hard-
ness and bitterness of this world. Again, being real is about cre-
ating life within both the bad and the good. So I also learned to
ask for help and let people look out for me instead of trying to
handle everything myself all the time. I felt alone and isolated,

2
like nobody else felt what I felt or even cared or understood
or empathized, I went around, then, just trying to carry every-
thing. Carry, like an ant who told herself she was Atlas. I tried
to carry so much I broke my psyche, I swear. I felt like I had to,
like there was no other option, but my mother taught me to fly
by opening up to my fullest, human experience, and embrace
its possibilities, even despite the hardness and bitterness of this
world.

And from that, I learned to become hungry and thirsty for
life, too. I hadn’t always wanted to keep living. Remember, I
felt like life was a war: that’s all it was to me. And Ihit a point
where I looked forward to the day I would die in the midst of
combat.

1 still struggle with this, But my godmother helped me de-
velop that desire to create my life, defend my life. She helped
me begin to see my future more clearly, and work towards it,
not just the collective vision, but my personal stake in it. To
be levelly human is enough. I would say that my godmother
helped me rediscover the value in holding onto that part of
things that feels like a secret between me and the Creator. The
beautyful things. She taught me to fly into a place of murtu-
rance, to walk like the Buzzard, honor the fallen, connect to
heaven and defend my people in a real way: a way where I
have not forgotten to open myself to my fullest, human experi-
ence, Where I have embraced all its possibilities, including the
mundane ones, the regular ones, the normal ones. Rejecting
pedestals.

So now I been going to therapy. Now, I been going to the
doctors. Now I been taking small steps to check in with my
health, Now I been wrestling with my traumas, fears, pain,
rather than suppressing it, Now I been figuring out the kind
of future I want for myself as I get older. And what things I
will take with me to the grave, things that others may not re-
member, but that are worth it anyway because I was the one
who lived them, and I was the one who defined them, and I

3
‘was the one who made sure they happened. Memories, laughs,
good vibes. And even mistakes, foibles, errors, bad times. Small
things. Apolitical things. And perhaps, in the end, these are po-
litical things too, just of a different kind.

It hasn't been easy, though. Learning these lessons. Being
levelly human, My godmother has to remind me all the time:
“remember to put the oxygen mask on yourself first” Because
I tend to forget. And I get riled up and wrapped up and bel-
licose and self-neglectful and ready for what comes of that.
Or I get stuck tryna be perfect, or tryna be heroic, stuck on
the pedestals, which is really to say, stuck trying to be an ab-
straction, stuck trying to be what I think everyone will remem-
ber me for, rather than simply living and letting my legacy be
what I and the universe and God decided regardless of what
anyone else said. Gender is, in the Black world, a territory of
cultural (or spiritual) and political maneuvers (as Saidiya Hart
‘man once said)~and we must fashion those in a revolutionary
direction... But there is a personhood and being who makes
those maneuvers we must discover and honor. A vulnerable
soul who flies not because she is reducible to spirit o resis-
tance but because she is a complex human responding to the
conditions forced onto her. Honoring that humanity is essen-
tial to balance. When we hit the grave, what will follow us is
our levelity, and that matters so much. But it can be so hard to
remember. I'm struggling with it right now.

It is Pride season at this point. And Juneteenth is here, and
finally getting attention in ways it had not before. Finally, also,
folks are acknowledging the real origins of Pride: that it wasn't
white people, but Black rebels, the same people who brought
chattel slavery to an end with a general strike that caused the
Civil War. These forms of acknowledgement from the ruling
class are only happening because white society is still scared
after the rebellions of 2020. Still tryna pander. Still worried that
wwe gon turn the fuck up on them. And they are right to be

4
worried. The Third Great Upheaval is still happening, it hasn’t
stopped. The same city in which George Floyd was Killed is ris-
ing up against militarized policing as we speak. Conservatives
have introduced dozens of new laws against reproductive au-
tonomy and trans rights, asa direct response to Black rebellion.
And they are trying to legislate our history out of the school
system, Brazil, Colombia, the UK, Haiti, and elsewhere, Black
folks are rising up against class, racial, and gendered violence.
In Ghana and Nigeria, Black queer folk are still being repressed
and on the front lines of struggle for right and decolonization.
And another prison strike could happen in the US.

As Black August is getting ready to come back around we
must remember these things. I will hit my fourth fugiversary,
then, my fourth year on this lifelong journey. Another season
of study, solidarity, spirit, and struggle. I'm looking forward
to the occasion for fasting and shouts and building with my
people and discovering and defining and determining who
am and why Iam here. I want to make sure Ihave a more bal-
anced head on my shoulders this time around, though: that’s
the goal. To practice that, with the help of my godmother, my
ancestors, our rituals, our myths, the root-grasping science that
is Black radical tradition, and a pursuit of my own choices, soft-
ness, brokenness, weakness. My own levelly human experience,
a life that creates itself within the bad and the good, the big
and the small. Holding onto that very mundane fullness is as
important to running away from what was forced onto me as
is the political pursuit of self-determination, or the spiritual
aligning of my inner head with a higher truth (collective des-
tiny and personal self-definition), or working to meet my mate-
rial/metabolic needs and connect to this planet. Iam beginning,
to learn that Ican only ride the winds if I'm levelling myself at
the same time.

15
“Throw my body anywhere
In that ole field

‘Throw my body anywhere
In that ole field

Dont care how you do me
In that ole field

Cuz my savior choose me
In that ole field

You might beat and bang me
In that ole field

But my savior choose me
In that ole field

‘Throw my body anywhere
In that ole field

‘Throw my body anywhere
In that ole field”

Epilogue

“When I have a child,

Iwill hang pink petals against
her black shoulders

And tell her to fly

She shalll spring before

the moon, with mosses
baptized in dew

sparkling against her
charcoal-colored flesh”

~ Prof.Ound
In African traditions, nine is the number of the wind, a
symbol of change, transformation, and revolution. This piece

had nine reflections with that in mind, to mark the nine days
from June 19th, the celebration of emancipatory struggle for

16
Africans enslaved in the United States which culminated in
abolition of chattel slavery and ongoing resistance to racial cap-
italism; leading to 27th, the night before the beginning of the
Stonewall riots against police led by working class Black and
other colonized trans, queer, nonbinary, and otherwise gender/
sexually variant street kids, which culminated in an expansion
of civil rights and Black Power struggle that continues today.

‘The ruling class has begun to use Juneteenth and Stonewall,
to make simplistic claims where Black resistance is co-opted
into the success of the capitalist imperial project. What comes
next is continued degradation of Black people especially the
Trans, queer, gender/sexually variant, LGB+ community be-
hind the guise of progress, coupled with immense criminaliza-
tion of anyone deemed a threat to the nation or nuclear fam-
ily. Despite this, our culture is being given a spotlight and the
promises of assimilation are supposedly now being extended in
our direction, under the auspices of acknowledgement about
the brutal history we have faced and fought against. And so,
the need for Marronage as a framing for Black transfeminism
is more prescient than ever, in reclaiming our spirituality, our
radicalism, and our levelity. Tokenization, fetishization, hyper-
visibility, alongside discrimination, harassment, and violence;
these are two sides of the same coin and they will only inten-
sily pressures on Black QTGNC life, especially in the form of
transmisogynoir.

Our community will have to rise up again, in the face of
this. It will not be because we are spiritual or political abstrac-
tions but because we are people, made into sojourners by an
accumulated historical process, and its material conditions. In
order to prepare for what is to come, we must remember our
evelly humanness and we must also remember that study, sol-
idarity, spirit, and struggle are among the tools by which we
must holistically affirm that for our unique selves. To the ones
who can fly: I will see you in the whirlwind.

7
Suggested Resources

78

Sunrise

1. The Importance of Ori

2. New Names, Old Gods: A Look at Seekin Rituals in Pente-
costal and Gullah Religions

3, Mourning in Trinidad: How Spiritual Baptist, Orisa, and
Ifa Traditions Converged in Laventille

Midday

1. Hoodoo Religion and America Dance Traditions: Rethink-
ing the Ring Shout - Katrina Hazzard-Donald

2. The Two Head Manifesto - Yahya Toure

3. Revisiting the Legend of Flying Africans - Sophia Nahli
Allison

4. Drums and Shadows - Works Progress Administration
Sunset

1, African American Ring Shouts

2. The Kongolese Saint Anthony

3. Queerness and Candomble

4, Esw is not the Devil

5. The Priest and the Prophetess

Midnight

1. Marcus Garvey - Look for Me in the Whirlwind
2. Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organiza~
tions 1960-1975 (Muhammad Ahmad)

3. Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-
Century Revolutions (Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad, Ja-
mal Joseph, and Sekou Odinga)

4, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Sunrise

1. Toni Morrison on Flying Africans

2. William Dorsey Swann

3, Senzala 0 Quilombo - Pedro Ribeiro

Midday

1. The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon)

2. Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon)

3. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle” (Wynter)

4. “What Will Be the Cure? A Conversation with Sylvia
Wynter”

5. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
6, “Towards a Vibrant and Broad Based African Anarchism”
7. “African Socialism Revisited” (Kwame Nkrumah)

Sunset

1. The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in
‘Time Perspective - Edith R. Sanders

2. Strivings of the Negro People - WEB Du Bois

co
80

3, Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race - Samuel
Cartwright

Midnight

1. Die Nigger Die: The Political Autobiography of H Rap
Brown

2. Revolution by the Book - Jamil Al-Amin
3, Mojo Workin - Katrina Hazzard-Donald

4. Run, Mary, Run - Rashida Bumbray

5. Assata: An Autobiography

Sunrise

1. Soledad Brother - George Jackson

2. The Roots of Black August - Shaka At-Thinnin
3. “Transphobia is a Respectability Politic”

4. “Pan African Revolt for a New Century”

5. “Femme Queen, Warrior Queen”

6. The Combahee River Collective Statement

7. “To The Ones Who Can Fly: Message from the Whirl-
wind"
The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

Nsambu Za Suekama
‘My Gender is Marronage
ARevisitation
30 June 2021

Retrieved on 17 December 2022 from redvoice.news

theanarchistlibrary.org
and father and your days will go well with you because your
parents have the power to make your life a living hell if you
dont” He more than once threatened my peace and financial
safety, and eventually I was forced to leave.

I remember what finally sparked my stepfather's decision
to send me packing. We were having an argument about poli-
tics and religion. We had never agreed on these things, because
my stepfather is a right-winger, and so we often debated each
other, and this time around it got really really really heated and
my stepfather started telling me that I did not have the Spirit
of God because of my gender variance. I kept trying to stress to
him that that could not be true because God wanted Black peo-
ple to free ourselves. My father kept trying to use Scriptures
that told people to obey their masters, and started saying that
“government exists for the lawless and insubordinate” And so
now I was letting him know that this government and its police
‘was a tool of the colonizer and slavemaster, and that nothing
about me and what I was saying was unholy. This is when my
mother started speaking in tongues and trying to exorcise me.
‘That night they both backed me into a wall, and Iexploded with
rage, and I said some hurtful things, and it got so bad one of
my brothers stood up ready to defend me because he thought
Iwas gonna get hurt by our father.

I breathe. In through my nose. I count to nine. I et the air
fill my belly. I breathe. Out through my mouth. I count to nine.
let my body relax into the wind. I try to release my shoulders,
especially. That is where I hold the weight. I inhale again. And
then T exhale, Counting to nine. I whisper to myself: “Wanna
fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down’

‘The wild thing was now unhoused, and had to pack their
bags and find a new place to go. Couches, cars, small rooms,
crossing state lines by bus, I started to live that street queer
life then, which so many other Afro-trans and Afro-queer folk
know too well, especially us trans gorls and trans fems.

23,
The wild thing then tumed to political theory to better un-
derstand herself, like Senzala 0 Quilombo from Pedro Ribeiro:

“[E]very once in a while, a laborious and dedicated
group of slaves would defect from the generosity
of the slave master’s whips and chains and senza-
las, and go into the jungle. They would run, day
after night after day after night, into the mata,
deeper into the forest; away from the treacherous
Capitaes to Mato, the black or mulatos overseers
responsible for capturing escaped slaves. In the
jungle, they looked for hope. In the jungle, they
looked for freedom. In the jungle, away from the
white man, they looked for the Quilombo.
Quilombos were city-states created in the heart of
the mata by escaped slaves. The most famous - the
largest and the one whose name was whispered in
secret in the dark by those in search of freedom -
that was Palmares. Palmares had a estimated pop-
ulation of twenty to thirty thousand, structured in
eleven different villages. In Palmares, as in other
Quilombos escaped slaves held the majority. Na-
tives and poor whites were also accepted into the
Quilombo, with and shared the same rights and
duties as anyone else, Decisions where made by
village assemblies, in which every adult, man or
woman, of every race, could (and most would) par-
ticipate.

No, Palmares was no utopia. It was no communist
society in which the decisions where as horizontal
as possible and in which all were seen as equal.
Palmares had chiefs, one for each village. The chief
of the capital, Macacos, was the king of Palmares.
But this is neither here nor now. The now is the
quilombo as opposed to the senzala.

24
Palmares died in flames. It fought until the
last person was dead. It had been fighting
for its sovereignty and independence for over
‘one hundred years. It gave its blood to defend
what it cherished most ~ its freedom and its
self-determination,

Whatever drove the Palmarinos to fight is what I
am interested in talking about. A friend of mine
said something that struck a cord in me. He said:
‘People are always talking about dying for this or
that. You gotta die for the cause if you are militant
enough, if you are really bad ass you should die for
your beliefs. But nobody asks, what are you living
for? Not dying, but living - what is your life for?”

‘The Palmarinos were living for something. They
were living for their freedom and their collective
autonomy. They were living for their right of self-
determination, to do away with the chains that
held them slaves in the past and to decide by them-
selves the path of their life. If they died fighting for
that, they died for what they were living for. They
died the death of free people”

My father thought things would turn into a “prodigal son”
story and I would run back to his threshold, knees bent, asking
for forgiveness, promising to obey him and obey his god and
ultimately align with the white social standards and backward
political opinions he and my mother held to so deeply. But 1
‘was fully committed to running as far away from all that shit
as possible. Aint nobody or nothing was gon hold me down,
cuz Twas fierce and I was proud.

My life did not get any easier from that point at all whatso-
ever, but there is nothing quite like the bravery and confidence
to face struggle that you get when you listen to who you truly
are within and against it

25
“Foot bone, shin bone
‘These bones gon rise again,
Shin bone, knee bone
‘These bones gon rise again
Knee bone, thigh bone
‘These bones gon rise again
Tailbone, back bone

‘These bones gon rise again
Back bone, neck bone
‘These bones gon rise again,
Neck bone, head bone.
‘These bones gon rise again”

6. Tukula (Thursday 24th June)

There was an Afro-Caribbean revolutionary named Frantz
Fanon who once said that each generation, out of relative ob-
scurity, must discover its mission, fulfill or betray it. Self dis-
covery is not just a spiritual journey, but a scientific one. The
‘Man knows this, that is why they always use religious narra-
tives or narratives derived from studies of nature to make us
align our inner heads with their bullshit.

Narrative is powerful because the brain has behavior reg-
ulatory mechanisms, which produce chemicals that we fill in
with symbolic meaning about what is right and what is wrong.
‘These symbols and their ethical content are based around the
historical experience of what activities meet our culture’s ba-
sic metabolic needs, and what activities may not help us do so.
When tied together, they create neurochemically salient narra-
tives that consciously reinforce the behaviors which a culture
defines as necessary for it to reproduce itself in its given envi-
ronment, We depend on nature, and we have to find ways to
transform our relations to it in order to get food, water, safety,
shelter, and more; but the actions it takes to do this may or

26
may not be beneficial, and even if itis valuable to one person,
it might not be to others. Some way, people have to create a mu-
tual agreed upon set of understandings about what works and
doesn’t work, in order to sustain socio-ecological interrelations
over times, and this is why every culture develops myths that
have two traits. They are often based on observations of natural
phenomena, animals, plants, ete and they convey

‘This same impulse doesn’t just happen when the narratives are
spiritual either; it also happens in the sciences, and it is why
scientists often talk about “nature” as a way to explain societal
relations, politics and economic issues. We are nature and nur-
ture beings, and narratives, both spiritual and secular, are used
to encourage the actions, behaviors, and divisions of labor and
skill which serve a particular culture's ecogenic (environment-
inhabiting or “world developing’) structures.

However, some cultures or people in power can come along,
and impose their specific systems onto another people, in order
to achieve their own selfish, destructive material interests, like
stealing land and owning folk as slaves. Their labor is exploited,
and the web of interrelations they share with each other and
nature is disrupted, and this causes a metabolic rift; and it is
bad for the environment because we become subordinate to the
‘master’s interests in profit over life and sustainability. This pro-
cess also has a cultural effect too. They will completely rewrite
that subordinated culture’s narrative, and make them believe
and follow something that is foreign to them and that serves
their own domination. These imperial cultures use religion or
science to make it seem like both the coercive narrative and
the systems they reinforce cannot be changed. Everything be-
comes fixed. It is black-and-white. The Word becomes flesh.
Right is right, wrong is wrong, You are sexually immoral: you
deserve slavery. This is the situation facing Black trans people.

We either internalize the curses they put on us, or we follow
the destiny laid upon our inner head, which we chose, which
‘we define. Oftentimes, the enslaved and colonized ends up do-

moral lessons.

27
ing both simultaneously, believing one thing about ourselves
and believing another all at once. A double consciousness. For
Black trans people in particular, it feels like dysphoria in our
head. It's like there is a veil between us and the rest of the
world; we try to struggle against it to get to what we need so
wwe can live out who we are. But the world that is forced onto
us makes us feel lesser, and they alienate us and seek to control
us, and will redefine how we understand ourselves so we will
be too scared to act on our own interests. We end up striving
against their narratives because the inner head is tryna get us
to our higher, truer selves. But, the world that is imposed on us
says something is wrong with us as individuals. There is noth-
ing wrong with the system, and the world they created; it's just
swe who are bugging, and our brain is warped, They blame it on
“phylogeny” or “ontogeny” They try to lay hands on us, or run
tests on us, to measure and “cure” us of a distinct wavelength
in our brains.

But, we are not broken. We are responding naturally to hos-
tile conditions, by trying to nurture a new way of inhabiting
the planet. It is a problem of “sociogeny” Our brains are trying
to implement an alternate set of mythically reinforced instruc-
tions than the ones pushed onto us. Those other instructions
the living legacy, the ancestral power, things that African hu-
man beings have been doing since before colonization and en-
slavement, things which call for a more egalitarian mode of
existence, such as Black trans folk determining our own gen-
ders. Our inner head remembers and contains these alternative
understandings, even if itis not that conscious to us at first.

Sylvia Wynter is an Afro-Caribbean woman scholar who
theorizes the scientific side of self-discovery. She says that the
way a people becomes more conscious of their symbolic affir-
‘mation is through rituals. She points to indigenous Kongo so-
cieties in Africa as an example of how this is done. Whenever
the community was under threat, she said they would use initi-
ation ceremonies to reinforce themselves. So while mystically

28.
speaking they would align their inner head with their destiny,
scientifically speaking they would immerse themselves in the
truths of their societies that were developed to uphold their
culture's ecogenic (environment-inhabiting) structures. Kimpa
Vita did this and that was why she ended up pioneering an
Ali:
Antony of Padua. The conjurors and rootworkers in the Hush
Harbor did this and that is how forms of anti-slavery resistance
got developed in their sacred spaces. In Haiti, a prayer cere-
mony was held at Bois Kayiman, conducted under the guidance
of vodun priests, one of whom encouraged the Africans gath-
ered there to turn away from the Man’s god and “listen to the
voice of liberty in your hearts” This helped spark the Haitian
Revolution, the world’s first ever successful slave revolt, and
established the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.

Ashanti Alston, a Black revolutionary, observes that in the
Yoruba religious context, rituals devoted to deities like Ogun
teach our people:

sovereignty movement through appeals to the Saint

“automatically, you have the right to rebel!
and second, ‘you must now prepare and transit
through an unavoidable hell to acquire the pow-
crs, insights, skills, and unities necessary for you
and the community to move to the ‘liberation
Hilltop?”

‘Then, there were some Africans who, as they became en-
slaved, turned stories about the trickster into ways for our an-
cestors to critique the Man in secret. The trickster was a door-
way to higher truths, remember, and that included the right
to rebel. For example, there's a ring shout song called "Move,
Daniel,’ that isa trickster tale disguised as a praise song. In this
story, Daniel goes to steal food from the master’s house. The
other enslaved folk noticed that the slavecatchers are coming,
for Daniel, so they start singing instructions to him on how

29
to escape, They use the song so that it can be assumed by the
slavecatchers that they were just worshipping.

Enslaved people would then use this ring shout song to
commemorate that story, but more importantly, to reinforce
their right to rebel, to steal if necessary, in order to get what
we need.

Ibelieve that Black trans people deserve to create our own
ways to affirm ourselves, on our own terms. When we dress as
we please, and shape ourselves as we please, when we name
ourselves as we please, those to me are all ceremonial acts. It's
the way we breathe life into ourselves, get in touch with our-
selves how we see fit.

But we also need to grasp this reality at its root, to trans-
form it, Fannie Lou Hamer once said that this is the technical
‘meaning of “radical” As the people who can fly, we are not just
descendants from spiritual rootworkers; we must use the peo-
ple can fly myth to remind ourselves about what it means to be
political rootgraspers. More than just an ancestral connection
to the wilderness, we need a material connection to nature to
get free. We must transform our ecogeny, by transforming the
mode of material provisioning through transforming the mode
of production, which is a question of class. All our ancient rit-
uals and spiritualities were in some way eco-centric, because
of a connection to more communalistie modes of production.
Kwame Nkrumah once said the task today is to harness the
spirit of those traditions into a revolutionary project. We must
look to power not just from sacred forces in the earth, but build
power from below and through the margins and in self determi-
nation based on revolutionary mode of inhabiting this planet
and using its resources. It's in these two things, both myth and
matter, that we will most fully determine ourselves by our au-
thority, in order to resist the Man and these coon ass straight
and cis people (even our families) who wanna keep us bound.

30
“Rest, believer, rest
Daniel

Rest, believer, rest
Daniel

Fly, believer, fly
Daniel

Fly, believer, fly
Daniel

On the eagle wing,
Daniel

On the eagle, wing
Daniel”

7, Luvemba (Friday 25th June)

I remember there was a gitl in elementary school who
started a whole trend with the other girls where they would
say “stop lying” but in a very nasal, sassy way, and drag
their vowels with it. And I remember following right along,
no question about it. It was fun to do, especially when we'd
all wag our head at somebody, cut them off while talking.
But unlike the other girls, it was an issue if I did it. Someone
like me wasn’t supposed to enjoy feminine stuff. For one, the
teachers didn’t like the ratchetness anyway; but now you have
to add a queer into the equation? Straight people can't tolerate
having another reason for the whole collective to be seen as
wrong, Society already said God was punishing us for being
criminals and having broken families and apparently the “gay
agenda” was making it worse for us. That is how the oldheads
put it,

But being told I was “gay” was confusing. I mean, yes I
liked men but I also liked girls. I also realized, however, that
I found myself drawn to anyone: I liked tomboys and mascu-
line women, tomgirls and feminine men, and people who didn’t

31
seem to fit any of these things. My attractions were not neces-
sarily romantic or sexual though. I remember there was this,
girl who lived next door to me and we used to hang out and
play together all the time, My parents suggested I had a crush,
on her. Then there was this boy I went to school with, and same
thing. always wanted to be around him. Somebody in my class
accused me of having a crush on him. In my head, though, I just,
liked being near them. There was an attraction, but it didn’t re-
ally have a name. I used to get compared to SpongeBob. He
was technically asexual, being a sponge, but everything about
him was gender and sexual fluidity. Whenever kids would talk
shit about the show I found myself feeling like I used to have
to defend SpongeBob, and really I was trying to defend my-
self, Even when I was in relationships with girls, I found my-
self being scrutinized, because I didn’t feel straight. But T also
didn’t feel “gay” I didn’t have any terminology like “bisexual”
or “nonbinary” or “transfeminine” at the time. Everything was
just “gay.” Ivemember one time this teacher deadass pointed to
me in the middle of class and tried to out me in front of all my
classmates. Any time I tried to be like “no, I'm not, it wouldn't
work because people felt like I was lying or being inauthen-
tic. And in some ways they were right: saying I wasn’t “gay”
wasn’t exactly true. It was so confusing.

One time, my mother told me that what would save me from
all of this was if I just leaned to “man up.’ I think that was
when I realized how wide the chasm between me and my mom.
was. Prior to that, I had felt an affinity with her, a unique close-
ness that was more like I saw myself in her. We were already so
similar: same music taste, mannerisms, likes and dislikes, and
even now we relate on a number of things. But she doesn’t ac-
cept that resonance as valid now just like back then she didn't
seem to fathom that what I was facing was wrong on part of
everyone else.

My brothers tried to teach me how to “man up”: for example,
pressuring me into doing shit like catcalling or running game.

32
felt so out of place, so weird, so uncomfortable, and so anxious
in those moments. It was like I wanted to climb out of my skin
and just have my soul shot away into a black hole or something.
Hiked girls, but not in a manly way, and definitely not on some
player shit; and yes I liked other genders, I was realizing, but
again, I didn’t feel like a man in liking men. I couldn't quite
name what it was, In actuality, I didn’t feel like anything. It
was neutral inside, so much so that there would be times when
my peers would say or do things and literally have to explain
to me that gender was the reason why they did it. Those rules
didn’t click in my head; they felt foreign, alien, beyond me.

Some of the double standards I heard growing up were also
just down right goofy. “Boys can't use straws,” was something
my grandmother once said. And then, all the stuff people said
“boys” could do just so happened to be racial stuff. That was
what really started making me question gender. I peeped how
race was shaping the way people talked about it, and that shit
ain't make no sense. How one day we talking about Martin
Luther King and Malcolm X and slavery and how Black peo-
ple had to fight against Jim Crow, and how wrong that was,
but then the next thing you know, folks are laughing at the
way white men walk or don't walk compared to Black men,
and then saying that white men were less masculine. Or they
were saying that white women were more feminine than Black
women,

“Then after saying this, folk would turn around and tell me
that because I was Black, and not white, I wasn’t supposed
to be feminine. Literally. It dawned on me that white people
were literally allowed to explore gender and sexuality in ways
Black people could not. And that's what I saw in the media:
white folks, doing “gay” things. Society legit felt like Black peo-
ple were only allowed a rigid standard of male-man-masculine
and female-woman-feminine. I swear, it was only because of
this realization that I came to know my African culture and
dark brown skin as “Black” (which is to say, that there was

33
any stigma attached to my body and being as an African per-
son). The color line was first etched into my awareness only
because of gender.

Iremember feeling like Jim Crow did not end for me then. I
still had to endure being called “boy” even when I didn’t want
to, Ihad to endure being called a government name I wanted
to reject. I had to watch how I walked, how I talked, how I
held my eyes or my wrist, to keep myself from being bullied
or even attacked. There was a constant anxiety and heaviness
in my body and made me feel like my consciousness was start
ing to split up. I found myself compartmentalized, just to cope,
shrinking myself into shards.

Especially because there was always the threat of Divine
judgements too. Hellfire. I constantly felt like T was battling
spirits, when really I was suppressing myself. Prayer felt like
‘warfare and it was laborious and terrifying. They called me
a “travailer” in church because of how heavy I prayed, how
my tears would fall like blood. There's no way to express how
pained my chest would be coming “out of the Spirit” How
many nights I woke up in fits and fear, quaking and babbling
in tongues trying to pray away what I thought was tormenting

One time my mother explained it to me like this: that gen-
der variance and sexual variance was demonized in the Bible
because of an association with heathen cultures. The people
of God were chosen to be “set apart” from such cultures, and
therefore this meant prohibitions against homosexuality and
effeminacy as part of their spiritual devotion.

The problem is, as [eventually learned, heathen and its asso-
ciation with “sexual immorality” always meant “African.” See,
long ago when the Bible was written, a story was recorded
from the Hebrew people about Noah, the man who built an ark
to preserve his family and many animal species from a flood.
According to the narrative, after he and his family and the other
living creatures got out the ark, Noah got drunk and passed out,

34
naked. Now, Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
Ham ended up seeing his father’s nudity by mistake, and so his
two brothers covered their eyes, walked into Noah’s tent back-
wards, and then covered their father up. When Noah got up,
he knew what had happened, and he got angry with Ham for
seeing his nakedness, and decided to curse Ham's son, whose
name was Canaan. In ancient Hebrew cultures, your firstborn
son was the one who inherited your legacy, so to curse Canaan
‘was to impose a curse on Ham's entire legacy. Noah said, “a
servant of servants shall he be” Canaan was doomed to be
enslaved. There is no literal truth to this story. Some schol-
ars believe this story was developed to explain why there was
conflict between the Hebrew people and certain other ethnic
groups in ancient Palestine.

Religious leaders, however, began to use this story to
explain how humanity had gotten divided into racial group-
ings. There is a map that was made during the time of the
ancient Roman empire. It depicts the Middle East and Asia as
being descended from Shem, and it depicts Europe as being
descended from Japheth. And it depicts Africa as being de-
scended from Ham. Because these religions taught that Ham's
legacy, through his son Canaan, had been cursed and doomed
to be a “servant of servants” this meant, in the minds of many
Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religions, that Africans were
all supposed to be enslaved. This is the origin of anti-black
racism,

To top it all off, since Noah only cursed Ham because Ham
supposedly saw him naked, followers of these religions began
to associate African people with sexual immorality, sexual pre-
dation. Today, when people think of Blackness, they think of
hypersexuality and physical prowess, they think of us as ani-
‘malistic in these ways, and there is a long history of Black men
and Black women being painted as sexually threatening and de-
serving of violence because of it. This goes back to the “curse
of Ham” doctrine.

35
‘There is a veil between us (Black) and them (white), and
gender/sexuality is like the needle used to stitch it together, to
keep the submissive knee-bender in line, to keep us seen as the
Hamite, and justify their right to dominate our land. Blackness
is therefore understood in a rigid, binary gendered fashion as
the way to qualify our savagery and uphold their pursuit of
African resources.

‘The veil established then pulls a wool over your eyes. You
end up believing the narratives put on you. Black people start
to really believe that we are what white Man religion says we
are, And then, for the trans girls and other gender variant folk,
awe end up feeling dysphoric. Or maybe we just feel worthless.
Ugly. Despicable. This was me.

Scared, I said maybe my brain is messed up. Imean, I do feel
split into two different directions. Two worlds. I don’t know. I
see what I saw in the spirit and then I see what is in the mirror.

Maybe that means I am crazy. Maybe I do have a disor-
der, My consciousness does feel split in half after all. Maybe
I can only ever be what they say our bodies are: man, straight,
woman, straight, right? I must have been wrong. My body is
wrong. My mind is wrong. Maybe I am worthless. Hamite. Sin-
ner. Abomination. Tranny. Fag. Nigger.

Irun from myself. I'm always fleeing. It's never a moment
rest in my spirit. My mind is racing daily. I'm being chased.
Snarls are at my back. I am worthless. I am despicable. I run.
I can’t rest. I run, Doors and walls are in my way. I have to
break them down. I can’t break them down. I run into them.
Bust through. I scar myself on the way but it don’t matter. I
can’t feel pain, I'm not supposed to feel pain. I just run, I cant
rest. I'm not supposed to rest. I run,

T'm being chased through a narrow, filthy, dark alleyway,
and the only measure of safety is to keep going, I am despi-
cable. I can’t rest. I run, If I can't run then I must fight, Fight
the enemy. Fight every battle. Or fix every problem. Try. Til
it overcomes me. Overtakes me. Wears me down. I drown. If

36
can't run, Imma drown. If T can't drown, Imma grind, If T can’t
grind then I'm numbing myself somehow.

I fall to the floor, and I can't get up. I'm broken. And I want
to fly up out of here but I just can’t. Fight or run; the only
two options. Run or fight. No rest. No escape. I am a slave. I
am a descendant of those the Europeans had dragged to the
Americas and the Caribbean and elsewhere in chains. And it
aint just the Word that says this of me, but also the science, so
it must be true,

Something about the environment in Africa had changed
our skin black, and that same environment caused us to be sex-
ually immoral, and lazy, and deformed our cultures and to this
day our environments, whether it's the village or the hood or
favela or the barrio or the reservation: it doing the same thing.
Proving that something is wrong with us.

In the United States, one of the scientists to point this out
‘was a man named Dr. Samuel Cartwright. Dr. Cartwright was
noticing that there were a lot of runaway slaves, rebels. Many
enslaved Africans got off the plantation, or they chose to slow
down working in the fields on purpose, or they broke one of the
tools, or they attacked the masters, or they killed themselves
so that the Man would not have anyone to exploit. All of these
actions would disrupt the flow of money and resources that the
‘Man was tryna gain off our backs. The masters needed a way to
puta stop to this constant resistance. First, they tried to use the
Bible to tell us that we needed to be obedient to their rule. But,
when that was not enough, their scientists came along to say
that trying to resist slavery was evidence of a mental illness.
Yes, Dr. Samuel Cartwright taught that the desire to get out of
our chains was nothing but a “disease of the mind” and that it
needed to be “cured” in order for us to re-align with what he
said was God's will.

‘The cure, according to “Dr” Cartwright, was for slavemas-
ters to find a way to balance not being too nice or too harsh.
Master had to follow a middle ground in order to use the power

37
over Black people that God supposedly had “willed” for him. If
s/he was too nice, it would make African people see ourselves
as human and want to run away; so the master had to exert
just enough brutality over us, according to Dr Cartwright, and
not let us think we were equal to them. If s/he was too cruel,
though, it would make African people sad and upset and ready
to run away; so the master had to give just enough crumbs
to us, according to Dr Cartwright, just enough comforts, basic
physical and material needs

“If treated kindly, well fed and clothed, with fuel enough
to keep a small fire burning all night-separated into families,
each family having its own house-not permitted to run about
at night to visit their neighbors, to receive visits or use intox-
icating liquors, and not overworked or exposed too much to
the weather, they are very easily governed~more so than any
other people in the world, When all this is done, if any one of
more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to
a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own
good require that they should be punished until they fall into
that submissive state which it was intended for them to occupy
in all after-time, when their progenitor received the name of
Canaan or ‘submissive knee-bender””

Flash forward centuries later. Our contemporary context.
Slavery is no longer legal; it was abolished after the Civil War
in the 1800s. But the US Constitution says that if someone is
convicted for a crime, then they can be forced back into it.
White society did not stop at the opportunity to begin creating
new laws that ended up criminalizing Black people in mass
numbers. This was a sneaky, legal way to force us back into
chains. When they could not jail us, they would claim that
without slavery, we would “revert” to our savage and sexu-
ally immoral, Hamitic ways. This way they could use Christian
hate groups like the KKK to lynch us and worse as a form of
non-legal punishment outside the prison, Over the course of
decades, the prison system became used to target us specifi-

38
cally, and has grown to become a source of labor for a num-
ber of corporations and produce goods for many towns, and
provide jobs to white folk who want to be police and corree-
tions officers and guards (aka modern day overseers and slave
catchers). As outrageous and evil as this is, Americans refuse to
abolish the prison/police/court system that is just modern day
slavery disguised, and they continue to use narratives about
sexual immorality/predators (the Hamitic hypothesis) as the
excuse for why.

‘They might not say it is about race anymore, either. They
will disguise it by talking about “violent crime? and fear of
predators, and talk about the IQs and “cultural pathology” of
these mysterious, immoral figures. It is a back door way to con-
tinue the dehumanization and demonization of Black people.
At the same time, they still give the promise of equal rights.
They still put up listings for a 9-5 so that you think you have the
opportunity to get on the grind, even if the wages are piss poor
or they fire you for any old reason or abuse you on the job. They
still promise some degree of health coverage to get by, even if
it ain’t the best or it is hard for most of us to access, or the doc-
tors intentionally harm or neglect you. And they still promise
us housing and education and water and food and soon clean
air, even though the housing is substandard and dangerous and
filled with poison, the education is underfunded and full of lies
and violence, and the water and food and air is full of toxins
and harmful chemicals

“They keep that balance between giving us some things, and
controlling us in other ways. Just like Dr Cartwright said. And
it is a bonus if you live in two parent homes they say, with
a straight, cisgender man in charge, and where everyone be-
lieves in white Man religion and is devoutly aligned with it,
and everyone talks and dresses “proper” like they do, and ev-
eryone looks somewhat close to or almost as light and thin and
delicate and “normal” and “human” as they do. These are the
ways to keep us governed, and if you step outside them, well

39
then you deserve what you get. You deserve poverty and police
abuse and poison/pollution and political/economic oppression
if you don’t meet their standards; you deserve poverty and po-
lice abuse and pollution and political/economie oppression if
you live in a broken or extended family; you deserve poverty
and police abuse and poison/pollution and political/economic
oppression if you are not Christian; you deserve poverty and
police abuse and poison/pollution and political/economic op-
pression if you don’t talk proper or dress proper; you deserve
poverty and police abuse and poison/pollution and political’
economic oppression if you are dark skinned or if you are fat,
or if you are rough or tough or hardened and mistrustful and
on edge and anxious and angry because of the bullshit we deal
with; you deserve poverty and police abuse and pollution and
political/economic oppression if you don't look or act “normal”
or “human” by their standards, And yes, according to the nar-
rative, you deserve poverty and police abuse and pollution and
political/economic oppression if you are not straight or cisgen-
der.

And so, the veil comes back. In the looking glass, when I'm
brushing my teeth. It pulls the wool over my eyes. The veil
comes back, when they use the pronouns I don’t accept. Or
when the paperwork speaks of a “biological sex.” Or when they
use that government name, that sla
like, the name I inherited as a mark that Iam someone's “son.”
And it pulls the wool over my eyes.

And the veil comes back, yes, even when I claim who Iam.
Even when I feel like I pass, even when the mirror don’t bother
‘me, when I feel fierce and fabulous, when folks accept my pro-
nouns, or even when they use my chosen name: the veil still
comes back anyway. When they don’t hire me for the job, they
disrespect my intelligence, it pulls the wool over my eyes. The
veil is back as they stop and frisk me, as they treat me like a
Thing, as they force me onto a grind that feeds their pockets
but bleeds mine out, and as they keep me trapped in a world

re name, the name I don’t

40
that feels too much like a plantation every day, and they deny
me housing, and as they jail me.

‘The veil is there again in all these ways and I cannot escape.
And its wool comes over my eyes and makes me start to won-
der again if | am bugging after all, and they are right. Maybe
I deserve this. Maybe I should not have transgressed. Maybe I
need to bend my knee. Maybe I need to obey. I have so many
reasons to already be seen as worthless, why add queer and
trans to the equation?

And so the veil, stitched together with the wool of gendered
prohibitions, calls me back to the prayer Closet. So I can bend
my knee again. And align myself with their narratives. But
there is an anointing on my head. It's saying something about
who I'm called to be.

‘There is an anointing on my head, and it's not a disease of
the mind at all. It's not a pathology. And it ain't demonic. It's
an ancestral calling. A higher truth. And it's something our
bodies have always made a possibility, and even when I'm not
fully conscious of it, it’s pointing me to something outside the
self that I need to do to get free. It tells me not only to run, or to
fight It tells me to balance myself. To find out who I am here to
be. And journey to create and establish that, and in so establish-
ing, to pursue the role I want to play in this world, When I lis-
ten to this, I start to pull the wool off my eyes, see past the veil,
even if just a little bit, and there's a higher truth there. Some
kind of horizon of liberation for us all. And when youcross that
line, you find not just something ancestral but also something
for the future. Some other world, perhaps, where one class of
beings doesn’t dispossess the earth of everyone else, keep us
subordinate to a profit motive, dominate our very bodies, op-
press our consciousness and desires, poison our lands and wa-
terways, and control our autonomy. Istart to lean into this, and
while it feels like it is opposite to “reality” I know that if I act
on it, I can synthesize it into this world, make the vision more
real, and make reality closer to the vision. So I start small: I

41
know that in that world I dream of, I am a mother, and I am
sitting down with kids, and I'm telling them the story of how
we as a people got free.

“Jubilee, jubilee

Oh, my lawd

Jubilee in the morning

My lawd, Jubilee

Jubilee in the evening

‘Oh, my lawd

Jubilee, jubilee

‘My lawd Jubilee

Dont care what you call me
Oh, my lawd

Shout my children, cuz you free
My lawd, jubilee”

8. Musoni (Saturday 26th June)

Iwas reading about Imam Jamil Al-Amin. The Black Power
revolutionary. He was once part of the Black Panther Party,
a self-defense formation that arose in response to racism and
the class war. He was also part of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, an organization from the civil
rights era that eventually became more radical because of the
influence of folk like Ella Baker and Kwame Ture. Baker, Ture,
and SNCC began to understand that the Black struggle in
the United States was connected to a global struggle against
capitalism and imperialism, aka the Second Great Upheaval.
Imam Jamil Al-Amin was known as H. Rap Brown during
those days, and he, like many Black revolutionaries of that time,
was constantly being framed by the government and police for
crimes he did not do, The US government, the ruling slavemas-
ter and land-stealing class, intentionally sent agents to either
infiltrate or set up Black activists and organizers, even pacifists

42
like Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King wasn’t even as militant or
radical as many of the others during those days, but the Man
still saw him as a threat, and they eventually killed him because
he became critical of capitalism and imperialism like the revo-
lutionaries were. Imam Al-Amin was able to survive that era,
however, something that a lot of Black radicals did not do un-
fortunately. He became a Muslim cleric and community leader,
and while he did not renounce his radical polities, he was not,
as engaged in more militant activity any more, at least not pub-
licly. Yet, the US still continued to target him, try and set him
up, trying to connect him to terrorist activity and associate him
with the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Anyways, I probably shouldn't have been reading about
this before bed. I felt like I needed to, though, especially be-
cause of the spiritual wisdom that Al-Amin teaches, One of my
favorite things reading about and from him are these words:

“To be successful in struggle requires remem-
brance of Creator and the doing of good deeds.
This is important because successful struggle
demands that there be a kind of social conscious
ness, There has to be a social commitment, a
social consciousness that joins men together. On.
the basis of their coming together, they do not
transgress against themselves and they do not
transgress against others”

1am not Muslim, but any time I read from Muslim revo-
Iutionaries like Al-Amin, not only am I impressed with deep
respect, but there is something in me that flickers, like a page
in a book turned by a wind. It is probably because ring shout,
despite being rooted in African traditional religion, had Islamic
influences, In the 1930s, Lorenzo A Turner was a pioneering lin-
guist of Southern Black Gullah cultures, and he connected the
use of the word “shout” to the Arabic word “sha'wt” The sha’ wt

43
refers to a circular movement around the Kaaba, the most sa-
cred site in the Muslim faith. Whenever Muslims pray salat,
and face toward the East, it is because of facing toward the
Kaaba, Circumambulating the Kaaba is something the faithful
engage in when they make the mandatory pilgrimage known
as the Hajj. The Islamic “shout” is a ceremony done in commu-
nity, seven times, and is supposed to represent oneness, from
what I understand. But I am no expert.

What I have gathered is that it was translated to the African,
traditional religious context in the United States because of
Christianity and enslavement. The Shout therefore became a
site of “syncretism? where various faiths and cultures inter-
acted with each other. Since it was a circular ritual, it was com-
fortably adopted into the perspectives of the various African
ethnic groups who valued the circle in their cosmologies and
beliefs. Katrina Hazzard-Donald talks about how the circle was
one of eight elements in a larger “African religion complex"
common to various African cultures, and that became the reli-
gion of Hoodoo in the United States. Here, beyond just being
a ceremony for the remembrance of God, it was also a ritual of
ancestral veneration, to remember those who came before us
and the wisdom they pass down.

I remember watching a Christian woman discuss her rela-
tionship to a ring shout. She said something about how it al-
lowed her to honor God through reflecting on what he did for
her people in the past. This is most certainly a residue of the
African religion complex, because in African traditions, it is
through the ancestors that one derives their initial understand-
ing of Creator, African traditions value learning from the el-
ders; ancestors are seen as your first spiritual elders. Africans
from among the Fon, Ewe, Igbo, Bantu peoples, Yoruba peoples,
Mande peoples, and various other backgrounds, were able to
create community together in the hush harbors, and combined
their contemplative and medico-magical traditions through it
that allowed them to resist. The ring shout was one of the cen-

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